Back to the dailies routine, at least for now…

Trekking through the forest above Heidelberg with my university research group.

Hello again. In case anybody wondered why there were no new entries during the last weeks – I was on vacation in France, without access to the net but obviously with my camera. Since I had to go about 1400 km, this first day was spent driving. So was half of the second day. Don’t worry though – there’s a lot of boring pictures in this post, but I think the sunset is worth scrolling down ;)

Good weather to leave the country.

Rain.

Rain.

More rain.

Short break, found something in the radio. Still had a good playlist on.

Better weather?

Not exactly.

Short break in Eguisheim.

Extending the short break…

Gas, baguette and cookies. The latter two are favorites of mine ^^

Would have been lost without it.

Oh, rain again!

Sun.

Rain. The benefit was that the regular rain intervals kept the windshield clean.

Dark and looming from one side.

Bright and beautiful from the other side.

Goodbye daylight.

Time to search for a parking spot to spend the night.

Still searching. In the end I stopped past midnight somewhere in no-mans-land.

Nice evening with friends on the Neckarwiese.

Again!?

Weinfest in Kirrweiler.

Saturday morning. Free day, took my time to hike a little bit.

Up to the Hambacher Schloss.

Not very stirring…

Descending through the forrest.

Anthill. Haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid.

The 24-70 F2.8 makes for a decent macro lens, at least when you don’t have a dedicated macro at hand.

Maikammer.

This would have been a good place to spend a few hours reading the literature I carried with me.

Quick peek at the map decided otherwise.

Going up again…

Wish I would have had my road bike with me.

The last few hundered meters up the Kalmit. Walked about 17 km that day.

There’s always something new to learn.

Back to Heidelberg.

Download in 2560×1600 pixels resolution, it also fits a 1920×1200 screen and can be easily resized for smaller resolutions and aspect ratios.

Copyright Notice: This wallpaper is copyrighted material. Using it for any kind of commercial purposes is forbidden, it is not allowed to be redistributed in any way without my explicit written permission. If you like to share it with other people, please link to this page. Contact me for further information.

Another shot taken on one of those amazing days of snow we had in the first weeks of the year. I just loved the atmosphere, especially when the sun was just over the horizon. Click for a larger view!

Download in 2560×1600 pixels resolution, it also fits a 1920×1200 screen and can be easily resized for smaller resolutions and aspect ratios.

Copyright Notice: This wallpaper is copyrighted material. Using it for any kind of commercial purposes is forbidden, it is not allowed to be redistributed in any way without my explicit written permission. If you like to share it with other people, please link to this page. Contact me for further information.

I always wanted to try this kind of shot, but it’s hard to get the right weather for the right mood. Certainly this could be improved, but I already like it enough to publish it here. Shot handheld at 1/20th of a second (which isn’t that hard with such an ultrawide lens). Click the image for a larger view!

The edge of a small forest, shot on one of many trips through the snow during the first week of this year. Comments are appreciated, click the image for a larger view!

Another wonderful winter day, sadly with limited time to shoot…

A clear evening sky lured me into the woods again, at nightfall. The remaining snow and the bright moonlight make for quite nice motive.

Those tracks in the snow were made by deer and rabbits, I was the first to go this way since snowfall.

It was pretty cold and windy, and because of limited time I didn’t shoot much more than two frames (ca 100 seconds exposure time) per scene and didn’t even switch lenses. The results are as expected ok but far from spectacular.

At about -10°C it seems to be pretty safe to underexpose the D200 at ISO200, 100 sec by 2 to 3 stops, recovering that amount in the RAW file in Lightroom doesn’t lead to high noise as I would expect it at room temperatures.