Zweihander

This gallery is an experiment – once again I’ve changed the software I’m using for processing photographs. It’s not an easy thing to do, nothing I was really looking forward to, but the need grew over the years as there were more and more reasons to do so.

The two biggest reasons were money and operating systems on my computer.

I’m just tired of paying for Capture One every time they release a new version and certainly I’m not willing to pay subscription for Photoshop. I’ve moved to Capture One in the year 2007 when it was in it’s version 4 and bought Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 in 2010 – and they were both very good tools for my work, but Adobe moved to subscription and Capture One is already in version 21 and that’s just too much money for my taste.

Second – Windows. I’m a PC user and both of these software needs Windows, however I’m using Windows less and less. Currently I’m using them only for some games and that’s just dozens hours in a year (and even that might be solved by Steam and Proton soon. Yes, I’ve moved to Linux. I was using Linux since the last century, but by then it wasn’t really usable as desktop. I’ve made it my daily driver some five years ago and I’m happy with it, the desktop grew a lot since I’ve first tried it and in many ways it’s more comfortable than Windows.

What software do I use now?

Rapid photo downloader it’s not necessary but it makes my life much easier. It’s downloading the pictures from the camera/cards and storing them in the folder structure of my preference and so on. I should have start using is years ago, but changing habits is hard.

However the main change comes with darktable it is my replacement for Capture One and partially even for Photoshop. I was very skeptical about it to begin with, but as I’m getting more and more accustomed to the controls and modules I no longer see any reason to move back. Actually I like it enough to send creators same amount of money that I would pay for upgrading my old solution.

Now for the Zweihander and photographies from there.

I’ve been on many battle larps in Czechia and Italy over the years but that was a long time ago, so any of my attempts for comparison might be outdated.

Zweihander is a Polish battle larp from the Warhammer universe. As far as I know, this was one of the first of big battle larp in Poland since the Covid pandemics strike us, therefore there’s no surprise that all the three hundred fifty plus players who arrived to a small village close to Katowice were full of anticipations. Even more so because the game was originally planned for the September 2020, but as everyone can guess — pandemics postponed it for a year. With that extra year of waiting the expectation of the players were growing, a lot – organizers had an extra year to prepare, right? Right…

I honestly know very little of the actual plot, aside from two armies build from various units trying to kill each other, and one winning in the end (in a conflict predetermined by the historical context of the Warhammer universe). That’s not because I didn’t listen to what is happening around, but my Polish is very poor at best and I just didn’t wanted to ask every time for translation…

Well, there was just little more over 30 foreigners and that wasn’t enough for the organizers to arrange for translation (or to speak in English) of current events – which was so much in contrast of how much text was translated into English for the website and social media.

As the reenactment events and Italians showed me, camp live is a nice thing. Nobody is full time in role, but it helps with the immersion and I do expect people to be doing something else than just beating each other to the head (there are other events for that). So yes, I’ve liked the camp live, traveling bards and tavern. And especially that you can pay for the real food by in-game money.

Potato guns aren’t legal in Poland, therefore all the guns and cannons were using compressed air for propelling the projectiles. It’s a nice, non-smelly options to the Czech potato guns, using the cheapest deodorants. However the ammunition is ugly – yellow balls that are lying everywhere.

Otherwise it looked good, despite the two days rain that turn everything to mud.

The place itself was nice, however the forest was too dense and all the actual locations were too far from each other. Especially camps for both sides of the conflicts were so far apart that there was virtually no contact between the players outside of the battles.

Last complain I will have was about the parking space. It was clearly benefiting one of the camps. It was comfortable 5 minutes from one camp and thirty plus over much harder terrain from the other (and accessing this camp by car was more suited for off-road cars rather than for city cars).

In the end I can’t say I’m happy with the photos I’m presenting here. I was forced to dump so many of them… because they were out of focus, blurry or too dark… I’ve lost my grip on photographing larps – maybe because I wasn’t on a proper battle larp for so many years.

I wish I could have blame all the dark clouds and rain and cold weather, but I can’t 🙁