Tag Archives: 60D

Cathedral excursion

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The Cathedral of Saints Catherine and Maurice, or Cathedral of Magdeburg, was one thing I had in focus for a very long time to photograph. But I never actually managed it. On Monday, my day off, I finally made it to this wonderful, beautiful piece of Gothic architecture. Currently it’s only worth taken interior pictures, because it’s getting refurbished on the outside. It’s such a rare event, to see this cathedral without any scaffold.

After getting the photo permit and clarifying certain things me and my Canon 60D were on the hunt for subjects. And we’ve found a lot. I did lots and lots of pictures of small figures in mural reliefs. It was so nice to see, with how much love for detail everything got restored. Back in the days, as far as I can remember, the Cathedral of Magdeburg was a very dark spot to visit. These days, warm diffuse light reigns inside the cathedral, not to divine.

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Seriously, I was very impressed how beautiful everything looked like and most importantly, no dark spots. Having a lot of light and also a lot of good light makes taking pictures so easy and such a pleasure. I spent more two hours inside the cathedral. I used my 17-85mm zoom lens, but only for a few shots. Most of the time did I walk around with my cheapo 50mm with a completely opened aperture of f1.8.

I also did some shots with my 8mm ultra wide angle Walimex lens, but I’m not very satisfied with the finals results. It’s still very difficult to get something in focus. And taking pictures with an aperture lower than f8.0 could have only been made with an extremely high ISO filmspeed, which I try to avoid as often as I can. Normally, I take pictures at f22 with this lense, because focus is no longer an issues you have to care about.

The final result was a virtual box of almost 400 photos to chose from. It’s a lot of material, but also, despite my excursion in the past, a lot of pictures are worth to get seen. I’m releasing them all publicly, but you’ll find a couple of pictures when you visit my profile on deviant art. You’ll also find some pictures I did on my last trip to Berlin, which was the first photo excursion with my 60D.

The gallery on this domain is currently down and will probably stay down, because I’m currently working on a new website, which will be dedicated to photography only. I’m not giving any details right now, but as soon as progress has gone far enough, I’ll inform you.

Deviant improvement

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As some of you may know, I’m an active member of the deviant Art community. I had an interest in photography, did not have any equipment, except my cam on my mobile phone and some crappy HP Photosmart that still seem to run on steam.

Back in the days, I wanted to see, if my interest for photography is actually real. I wanted to see if I stick with it, or if it’s just a mayfly. It turned out, after a couple of month, that this romance with photography was for real. In the meantime did I start doing some research on photo equipment, because I wanted to take decent pictures, too. As a fellow reader of this blog, you may remember that my final choice was a Canon EOS 500D with a standard 18-55mm lens.

My first pictures were taken with the creative programs that came with the camera. But after a very short period of trial and error I decided to switch the program wheel to the ‘M’ position and take control of every single aspect of the picture. It was a very steep learning curve that I took and without a doubt, the first pictures I took were absolutely horrible. Overexposed, underexposed, terrible f-stop, horrible composition, you name it.

I’m still in a learning progress, and hopefully will always be, when it comes to photography. Simply, because the curiosity, that drives you and the will to experience and learn something new, is the gasoline that keeps your creative engine up and running. I don’t say that the pictures I take these days are greater art, but compared to the shots I took two years ago, I would say, I’ve improved.

I’ve recently upgraded to a new camera, a Canon EOS 60D. Very, very recently, to be exact. Next step is to save some money for my first Canon L-lens. The lens that I currently use for the everyday situations starts to have more and more issues, I can no longer live with on a daily basis. Manufacturing wise and also in picture quality. But the main issue is definitely its slow focus response time and the weird focus itself. Well, we’ll see what lens the future brings.

After over two years of being a “deviant”, I can say, that it’s still fun to watch, what so many other people all around the earth create in photography. The community is still a very polite one and it’s mainly the new and unexperienced user that offends from time to time. But the community is aware of that as well and most of these newbies leave as fast as they came.

The only thing that bothers me a little, is that the quality deviant Art once stood for has turned more into a matter of quantity. Unfortunately do a lot of people put out so much rubbish and crap on deviant Art, that it’s almost close to be declared as spam. I mean, why so many pencil sketches of anime characters that no one actually cares about? But nevertheless, it’s still fun to be deviant.