Germany 2025 – Gear I Used

In mid June, I was on another trip to Germany with my now 94 year old dad, this time just over two weeks. One of the major reasons for going is my dad’s declining mobility and the fact that his last surviving brother, who is in his mid 80s, also has some health challenges. They were both thinking that this might be the last time they see each other, and leaving was a near tearful affair. We spent a lot of time with my uncle, Helmut Mander, and I’ve now heard more tales of his history with Opel and Ferrari than ever before. He happens to have been instrumental in opening up the Ferrari import market in Germany back in the 1980s, building a network of authorized dealers with trained repair technicians, something that did not exist in the country before.

My uncle used to race for Opel in the 70’s and early 80’s, specifically hill-climb racing (pavement not dirt), and he became famous for drifting corners during races and for at times even beating drivers racing with larger engines and more horsepower in classes above his. If I understood the story correctly, my uncle was invited by a Ferrari & Opel dealer in Italy to watch a local Ferrari Challenge hill-climb race there, and he just happened to have trailered his 2.0L, 200 horsepower Irmscher prepared Opel race car there from Germany. After the race, much to everyone’s disbelief, he wagered that he could beat the best time of the day by 30 seconds, despite never having raced or driven the course previously. Everyone was extremely skeptical of course, so off he went in his Opel and beat the best time by a whopping 33 seconds, a huge amount for the length of the course! This really caught the attention of the Ferrari rep. at the event (“…we need to hire that man!”) and the rest, as they say, is history. Little did they know that my uncle had raced against the two top drivers of the day previously in other races, and thus was quite confident he could beat their times!

My uncle also started the German Ferrari Club and over the years, and they often rented the entire Nürburgring for their events, bringing in Ferrari drivers like Michael Schumacher to draw more people. It wasn’t cheap to rent the ring for a day after all, somewhere around 80,000 Euros back in the day, so they needed solid attendance! Please note that any image embedded in the blog posting can be clicked on to open a larger version in a new window or tab…

My uncle showed us his extensive Opel racing photo album and newspaper clippings reporting many of his wins, and his fascinating Ferrari photo album which spanned a few decades as well. Above is one of many photos from the album I snapped with my iPhone and one more below…

An interesting anecdote about a vintage Ferrari my uncle was hired to race by its owner back in 1987, a car apparently worth about 1 million Euros at the time. Even without a roll cage, he drove it very aggressively and drifted it frequently, something he was known for… and in the process made the car’s owner rather nervous! In the end he won the race and because that Ferrari won, a few months later the owner sold it for several hundred thousand Euros more! That said, my uncle may have meant 1 million Deutsche Marks (DM) since the Euro didn’t come into use until over a decade later, which meant the car would have “only” been worth about 500,000 Euros at the time before the race, and not a million. Anyway, back to my photography now!

I did not shoot much on this trip, since it was mainly about visiting family. We had a big family reunion luncheon (my uncle and his partner plus 3 cousins and their families) and despite not everyone being able to join us, we still had 14 people there. It was very nice, and wow, was it ever hot that day – nearly 40ºC. There were two times where I had opportunities to take a good number of photos, once at the ancient Saalburg Roman fort ruins & museum outside of Bad Homburg (title photo of this blog posting is from there), and another time in the lovely little town of Gengenbach in Southern Germany’s Black Forest.

This time around, I shot with what has been my main camera now for nearly 10 years, my 24MP Fujifilm X-Pro2. Despite not having IBIS, I managed to capture some dark interior shots at fairly low shutter speeds, and with some modern noise reduction tools, I was able to really boost the dynamic range of some dark images to even exceed what some more modern sensors are likely capable of, well modern sensors without extra NR assistance anyway. I have been using the latest DxO PhotoLab 8, and its Deep Prime XD3 noise reduction does a fantastic job of differentiating actual image detail from noise, and also dealing with the inevitable hot pixels an older camera like my X-Pro2 can suffer from. All the “DxO versus others” samples below used their latest Deep Prime XD3.

The above sample was shot at ISO 800 and 1/25 second, underexposed intentionally to maximize the stained glass window detail and saturation, and to minimize blowout on the sunlit patches on the wall. You can see how much detail I was able to extract in the shadows. Below is one comparison showing a 100% crop of the dark right edge of the frame. Note that to really see the image quality differences, you should click on the following screenshot comparisons and zoom in to 100% when they open in a new tab or window…

In the above comparison, only using Lightroom’s regular NR and not its new AI DeNoise, you can see how much cleaner the DxO version is, and it had settings backed off from stronger defaults. Lightroom is terrible at fixing hot pixels too and even though I had both the shadow and black sliders pegged at 100%, it also didn’t get anywhere near as deep into the shadows as DxO managed on the same shot.

The next example is DxO on the left, shadows brightened even more (and nowhere near the max either), and on the right is Lightroom with its advanced denoising activated. Do note that this is still the maximum shadow detail I could extract from the image with Lightroom, and also while it fixed many of the hot pixels, some remain as white specks in the Lightroom version where DxO essentially got rid of all of them. DxO let me go much further and gives surprisingly clean results in this situation, considering the camera is APS-C and nearly 10 years old, shot at ISO 800 and shadows boosted by many stops! Imagine what you could do with DxO and a modern full-frame or even medium-format sensor?!

One thing that has enabled me to start easily using some of the more advanced denoising tools, is that I recently upgraded my old top-of-the-line 6-core Intel Core i7 Mac Mini to a new Mac Mini, just with Apple’s base M4 processor (not an M4 Pro). It is truly mind-blowing how much faster the new computer is, despite being a base model with only slightly upgraded RAM (24GB). With DxO DeepPrime XD3 noise reduction on the above image, what took over 6 minutes on my old computer finished in 10 seconds on the new one, a near 40x increase in speed. One different test I did, using Topaz Sharpen AI on a severely motion-blurred shot, the new M4 Mini was well over 200x faster, from 17 minutes on the old computer to under 5 seconds on the new! This new computer allows me to easily (and quickly!) use enhanced NR tools to gain high ISO quality and even improve low ISO dynamic range, and honestly, it is like getting a whole new camera in some ways. If you are still running a Mac System with an Intel processor, do not hesitate to get a new one with an M-series processor if you are working with images!

As far as lenses on this trip, I don’t have anything new to report on, although this is the first trip to Germany where I had my Fujinon XF 8mm f/3.5 R WR and having such an incredibly wide field of view can be very useful at times, when you are on tight little streets trying to take everything in to really give an impression of what it’s like to be standing there. Looking at my Lightroom library, I shot a mere 460 photos on my trip, a quarter to a fifth of what I might normally shoot on a trip like that. Here is a screenshot…

As far as my overall lens usage, not surprisingly my shots with the XF 8mm f/3.5 R WR and the XF 14mm f/2.8 R together amount to almost half of all of my images. As I said, ultra wide lenses are very useful there! My most used lens was my XF 18mm f/1.4 R LM WR and not surprisingly, it happens to be my sharpest wide angle lens. It continues to amaze with its quality. It seems I hardly used my 35mm and 23mm lenses and despite having my 55-200mm along, it got zero use. Interesting. The original XF 14mm I’ve had since my X-E1 days continues to prove an outstanding lens as well and as you can see, it got a lot of use as well.

One with my oft used Fujinon XF 18mm f/1.4 R LM WR lens…

I never once used a tripod, nor did I use my IR converted X-E2 which I had with me. I also never used my little Metz flash, preferring just ambient light in all situations. I used my polarizing filter once, but never my Nisi Natural Night (didn’t do any night shots), nor my dark ND filters. All in all, a pretty basic trip photographically. Nothing fancy and nothing too challenging! One more shot inside the Saalburg Museum…

So for those who’d like to geek out further on 100% zoom noise reduction comparisons, you can keep going…

Note that while I find DxO PhotoLab vastly superior to Capture 1 Pro as far as noise reduction, I still love the workflow in Capture 1, especially using my LoupeDeck Live (sadly now discontinued), and I use that for all my regular, non-challenging photos. Below is noise reduction maxed out in Capture 1. Sadly, noise reduction leaves all sorts of squiggly artifacts and I would only ever use it in Capture 1 at mid-level settings. Anything really noisy looks better in Lightroom and far better in DxO Photo Lab. Do note that Capture 1 allows me to dig into the shadows just as deeply as DxO, but the results are very grainy and not really useable when going to such extremes as in this example photo…

Now I will finish off with a set of screenshots with 100% zooms from the brighter top of the same image so you can see how the differing processing compares. I would like to note that generally, Lightroom’s new AI denoise is actually extremely effective as well and not at all far behind DxO’s Deep Prime. I have seen examples where Lightroom does a slightly better job and others where DxO takes the lead (especially in controlling hot pixels), but where DxO really shines is when you combine all of its optical corrections, its many noise reduction options and extreme pushing of shadows and other tonal manipulations, well taking all that into consideration, it is hard to beat and I deem it to be a worthy tool in one’s image processing arsenal…

 

 

 

So if you made it this far with all the comparison geeking out… well congrats! If you do have any questions about the various denoising and processing techniques, do feel free to contact me. I suppose I really should have titled this post “Germany 2025 – Gear I used and Noise Reduction Comparisons!”