Die neue Burg

Posted on Februar 5th, 2014

I don’t know why it’s called “The new castle”. I mean, I can imagine, but why not a visionary name? However this is one of the many awesome buildings in Vienna. And I shot this picture at night, without the whole tourists and all the traffic in front of it, except for a few cars. The hard part is this yellow light. There are nearly no other colors in the image and I don’t know how to correct it. A bit yellow is okay but it looks like yolk to me.

Boost up the Andromeda nebula

Posted on Februar 4th, 2014

As I promissed you last week; here is my 2nd try at the Andromeda galaxy. If you compare them both, you will see how much better this image is. I used a better camera, 5DmkII and I used a better tripod head for the Astrotrac. This time it was possible to use a longer exposer time, until the stars turned to lines. But I saw other images of the Andromeda, so I know I could do this far better. Be prepared for my next try in a while, because at the moment I can’t make good photos of andromeda, it is too near at the horizon.

Blade of grass the 2nd

Posted on Februar 3rd, 2014

Another day another blade of grass. Or maybe it’s the same, who knows… but this time the sun is still on the sky. The only shadow I had was this single blade. The whims were chirping and the vulture were already circling about my head. Hm, okay, we don’t have vultures here in this region maybe there were some other birds or no birds circling, I don’t know anymore

A cloudy holiday

Posted on Februar 2nd, 2014

It was on my first journey with my DSLR and I made so many things wrong. It seems I had to do this journey through the US again to fix the mistakes I have done
I was not so happy on this day with the weather. After I woke up and watched out of the window, I saw it was snowing, in May near Las Vegas! Hell I wasn’t prepared for this cold temperatures. But well, the weather was bad but good for getting nice HDR images. Bad weather conditions are made for this kind of images. If you do normaly shots, you will get a nice white sky, but with a bracket series…

A little bit winter

Posted on Februar 1st, 2014

After two hard days of working, I had to go out at night to came down. Not for drinking beer but for making Photos! I drove up to the sternmost part of Appenzell in hope to have at least a bit winter here. And yes, there was a bit, but only a bit. The sky was really clear, no clouds and no moon was disturbing and because of the Fön, so is called the warm wind over the Alps, it was very warm about 2°C. This time you see a nearly perfect nightshot from me. I used my new 14mm Samyang at f4 with only 800ISO on my 6D. And now look at this image how clear and noiseless it is. I like this technique! And think of it, there was no moonlight.

Toggenburg

Posted on Januar 29th, 2014

At a nice spring evening I was near this region and I thought why not take a rode deeper into the Toggenburg and shoot from a higher position an image with all this mountains at the background. What should I say, I did it :).
Unfortunately I was a bit to late to see all the peaks glowing by the deep standing sun. But look at this beatiful landscape with the awesome lightning. It was definitly worth it to run up this hill to get a picture.

The shrinking glacier

Posted on Januar 28th, 2014

If you are watching a map, then you’ll see the Grindelwald glacier is going nearly down to the valley ground. But as you can see, there is missing a big part of ice at the end. Anyway this glacier looks still very impressive. I shot this image with my 100mm macro from the other valley side. If you are close to a glacier you should go for a hike to it and watch it from near distance.

Andromeda

Posted on Januar 27th, 2014

Andromeda our neighbour galaxy. It’s the nearest galaxy to the milkyway and it’s only 2.5 million lightyears away, with a diameter or nearly 1 million lightyears. Andromeda is the largest object at the sky which you can see by your eyes in very dark nights. The surface at the sky is larger than the moon but less more bright.
This was my first try to get an image of Andromeda. And I’m not very happy with it. It should possible to get more contrast in the inner part of the spiral galaxy. I tried it one year later again and I’m much more happier with the other result, which I’ll show you next week. But still, there is more potential to get a better image.
I took 5 images with 300mm at the 60D by f/9 and 3200ISO, don’t ask me why f/9.

Blackberries

Posted on Januar 26th, 2014

Hmm, delicous! Wild blackberries at the edge of the wood and you can pluck and eat directly or you can make jam. But the blackberries are like weed here. The whole forest floor is grown of the thorny tendrils. And they grow all over, at the end the forest floor is completely covered with the thorny blackberry bushes. Good our farmers are cutting down the bushes from time to time.

The barrier lake

Posted on Januar 26th, 2014

This is one of maybe one hundert barrier lakes in Switzerland. I shoot this photo in april after a long winter, not like this winter. And you can see at the border of the lake the broken ice. Each time when they used the water in the barrier lake to generate electricity, the water surface sunk a bit deeper and crushed the ice at the shore. Good to have so many mountain valleys to get clean power, more or less.