Category: Nature

The Calendar Files … 2020 … Südtirol — South Tyrol

Well, just to recap … we’ve reached 2020 and this is the cur­rent cal­ender — show­ing our trip to the South Tyr­ol region around Brix­en and the Plose.

The full image series is still to come … soon.

 

Detail in the Fran­zens­feste Fort­ress, built between 1833 and 1838 by the Aus­tri­an Emper­or Ferdin­and I

 

Hik­ing at the Plose

 

On our way to the fam­ous Herrensteige

 

Mid May — it was still quite cold and in the high­er regions still snow was around — nature was giv­ing its first try

 

Firmi­an — Schloss Sig­mund­sk­ron, one of the six museums of the MMM, the Mess­ner Moun­tain Museum, cre­ated and oper­ated by Rein­hold Messner

 

Nature’s first try mid May, while it was still quite cold

 

Highest point on the Herrensteige

 

Nature is so amaz­ing when try­ing out its full cre­at­ive power

 

Not to miss, even on a lone­some trail

 

Juval — anoth­er gem in the series of the Mess­ner Moun­tain Museums (MMM). In Juval, Rein­hold Mess­ner is stay­ing with his fam­ily half the year dur­ing sum­mer time.

 

Amaz­ing mood here in the South Tyr­ol Alps

 

A small lake and some snow fields, the Wacker­er See

 

Fran­zens­feste Fort­ress — the tun­nel con­nect­ing the main fort­ress and the upper fort­ress with its ~400 steps

 

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

The Calendar Files … 2019 … Ireland

Well, just to recap … we’re in 2019 and we are vis­it­ing Ire­land this time dur­ing a trip around the its South-West.

Enjoy! The full series can be found here.

Streets of Dublin

 

Kilkenny

 

The Bur­ren

 

Near Gal­larus Oratory, Kil­malke­dar, Ireland

 

Around Muck­ross House and the Muck­ross Lake, Ireland

 

Trin­ity Col­lege, Dub­lin, Ireland

 

Kells Bay Gar­dens, Ireland

 

Kil­main­ham Gaol, Dub­lin, Ireland

 

Derry­c­lare Lough, Twelve Pines

 

Nation­al Lib­rary, Dub­lin, Ireland

 

Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

 

Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

 

Around Muck­ross House and the Muck­ross Lake, Ireland

 

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

Irelands Southwest and West (Part 5)

Part 5 of our 2017 trip through Irleands South­w­est and West. Com­ing to the final (ana­log) part of our tour which leads us from Con­nemara back to Dublin.

Leav­ing won­der­ful Con­nemara and the County Galway …

… and enter­ing Dub­lin — what a contrast.

Hav­ing some nice food …

… and walk­ing over the Ha’­Penny Bridge.

Next post will cov­er the digit­al part of the journey.
Earli­er parts of this series can be found here.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

 

Irelands Southwest and West (Part 4)

Part 4 of our 2017 trip through Irleands South­w­est and West.

Leav­ing The Bur­ren and Doolin (and the Cliffs of Moher, but that’s anoth­er … more digit­al … story) behind us, we headed north to touch Gal­way, the beau­ti­ful old town lay­ing on our way to Con­nemara County.

Gal­way … with some typ­ic­al Irish pub :)

From Gal­way it was a short, but nev­er­the­less beau­ti­ful ride to Clif­den — our final stay in the west.

Dog’s Bay and Gur­teen Bay — two nice beaches lay­ing vis-á-vis on a spit of land.

The tiny vil­lage of Round­stone, with its ceram­ics and craft shops.

Up to the Skyroad (giv­ing its unique driv­ing exper­i­ence), driv­ing by cloud covered hills and …

… hav­ing a fant­ast­ic look from the Wild Atlantic Viewpoint.

… still more ana­log work to come.

Earli­er parts of this series can be found here.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

 

A Nikon F‑301 travelling Ireland

Over­ture

Mid 2017 we made a two week trip through Ire­land. Motiv­ated by Jim Grey from Down the Road who made sev­er­al won­der­ful posts about his jour­ney in 2016, I tried to get hands on an old ana­log Nikon F‑301 cam­era with a 35mm lens attached. I packed five rolls of Agfa Vista 400 to feed the Nikon and packed … guess what .… my Work­horse as an every­day backup togeth­er with its fant­ast­ic M.Zuiko 12–40mm PRO lens.

 

 

You can find the Agfa Vista 400 col­our ver­sion and a black & white ver­sion of all images here … I will add them in my cur­rent Ire­land series over the next days and weeks.

After this, in a second series, the digit­al res­ults will follow.

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

Hiking the Haselstein and the Center of Central Europe

On this hike I car­ried with me three cam­er­as — maybe I should stay at one per hike only, as weight is always an issue.

The film one was a Con­tax G2 with its Carl Zeiss Biogon 2.8/28mm attached. I loaded a Kodak Ultramax 400. After the second image the cam­era stopped work­ing due to an empty bat­tery. As I had no spare on hand, all the rest was made digit­al only.

The first digit­al one was a Sony A7R2 with a M39 Voigtländer Col­or-Heli­ar 2.5/75mm attached where I loaded again … a pretty cool sensor ;)

The second digit­al one was the beloved Ricoh GR II.

The full album can be seen here on my flickr pages. I made a col­or ver­sion and a black & white ver­sion again.

Images above were made with the Con­tax G2, Carl Zeiss Biogon 2.8/28mm on Kodak Ultramax 400.

Images above were made with the Sony A7R2, Voigtländer Col­or-Heli­ar 2.5/75mm.

Images above were made with the Ricoh GR II.

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

Hiking the Waldnaabtal

On this hike I used two cam­er­as. The film one was a Con­tax G2 with its Carl Zeiss Biogon 2.8/28mm attached. I loaded a Kodak Ultramax 400. The digit­al one was a Sony A7R2 with a M39 Voigtländer Col­or-Heli­ar 2.5/75mm attached. I loaded … a pretty cool sensor ;)

The full album can be seen here on my flickr pages. I made a col­or ver­sion and a black & white ver­sion again.

The Con­tax G2 is a gem … I men­tioned it already in anoth­er post about its sib­ling, the Con­tax G1. Regard­ing the lens … I’m impressed by the sharpness.

All images above were made with the Con­tax G2, Carl Zeiss Biogon 2.8/28mm on Kodak Ultramax 400.

The Sony A7R2 … is simply a cool tool which I mainly use with vin­tage glass. The manu­al M39 Voigtländer Col­or-Heli­ar 2.5/75mm is so easy to handle with the focus peak­ing, it’s light­weight, small and deliv­ers a won­der­ful sharpness.

All images above were made with the Sony A7R2, Voigtländer Col­or-Heli­ar 2.5/75mm.

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

 

Perseids Meteor Shower

Anoth­er astro­nomy high­light was the Per­seids Met­eor Shower occur­ring in August and this year we were lucky, as it was new moon and so it was quite dark out­side, here in that rur­al region.

The max­im­um hit rate was announced for Monday morn­ing around 4:30 GMT, I knew that I’d not wait that long.
Start­ing around 23:15 CET by set­ting up the equip­ment — tri­pod, cam­era, beer, I thought the Olym­pus OM‑D E‑M1 loaded with the M.Zuiko 12–40mm f/2.8 should give enough width at 12mm to cov­er a nice area of the sky around Perseus con­stel­la­tion in the north-east­­ern sky.

Try­ing some set­tings to get the most out of the night sky, I ended up with focal length 12mm (cor­res­pond­ing to 24mm FF), aper­ture wide open at f/2.8, between 10 and 20 seconds expos­ure time and ISO 1600. Fol­low­ing the rule of 500, stars start to move on an image when the expos­ure is longer than 500/focal length. So 20 seconds seemed to be the max­im­um here. The EM‑1 makes it easy set­ting up shot sequences in cam­era, so I tried 99 shots each time. First set was 10 seconds and the rest were 20 seconds expos­ure time, so I had between 6 shots per minute in the begin­ning and 3 shots per minute in the rest of the session.

Mak­ing nearly 375 pic­tures between 23:30 CET and 01:39 CET I found exactly ONE shoot­ing star on my images … hmm, I should practice ;)

What I found a lot, were blink­ing air­plane trails, as the loc­a­tion seemed to be on the flight path from Nürn­berg to Prague — busy night.

Both pic­tures are JPG out of camera.
Dur­ing the time the E‑M1 did its job, I saw many more shoot­ing stars in the east­ern to south-east­­ern region of the sky — most of them at the end of my ses­sion. Unfor­tu­nately the cam­era was point­ing to the north-east.

My con­clu­sion: Had a nice time in the dark out­side at 12 °C with a won­der­ful night sky. Next time I’ll try the 7–14mm lens to cov­er a lar­ger por­tion of the sky … and hope­fully cap­ture some more of that beauties ;)

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

Once in a mankind — Lunar Eclipse with Mars

My first thought was … argh … there will be mil­lions of beau­ti­ful, sharp and frame filling pic­tures on the inter­net already nano­seconds after this event has star­ted. Then I thought … let’s have a look … and I saw the dark brown moon rising over the south­east­ern horizon.

Hm, … I fetched my bin­ocu­lar and enjoyed what I saw … frame filling … oh my dear.

Well, to make a long story short … I went inside and fetched my work­horse — guess what I mean — moun­ted the longest lens I have for it — the M.Zuiko 75–300mm lens (which cor­res­ponds to 600mm on the long end) — moun­ted it on a tri­pod and star­ted tak­ing some pic­tures. Some­where I read that this spe­cial event will occur again in around 100.000 years … wow … and I was watch­ing it now … live.

The small dot in the lower right is Mars — the red planet.

Well, that’s it … ah … this time there is no black and white version ;)

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.

Inspiration is the motor for improvement

Did I ever tell the story, … why I love a spe­cial kind of city sky­line images?

It was some time ago, when I was look­ing for some­thing wide, some­thing quite wide, some­thing quite large and some­thing … quite old.
I found a Zeiss Ikon Ercona, a 6x9 tech­nic­al won­der from the early fifties — last cen­tury. This gem uses a large format in a small body — it is a fold­ing cam­era using a 105mm Zeiss Tes­sar lens. Soon after, I found a spe­cial image on flickr … from the Swedish pho­to­graph­er Gust­af Emanuels­son. It was an image of the Copen­ha­gen Sky­line. The image is mind-blow­ing. I do not include the image here — simply a link to the flickr location.

Yes, an Olym­pus OM‑D E‑M1 with its M.Zuiko 12–40mm is not 6x9. Nev­er­the­less I tried the image of the Mel­bourne sky­line with that mas­ter­piece in mind. Yes, this res­ult is lightyears away from what I had in mind … but this means there is room for improve­ment and … fur­ther images.

The image was shot using the equip­ment men­tioned above and it was slightly cropped and post-pro­­cessed to get a de-sat­ur­ated col­our ver­sion and a b&w ver­sion.

In case you’d like to com­ment, it’s appre­ci­ated … and maybe, you want to vis­it my web­site or my flickr page too.

So long … and thanks for all the fish.