The Colloseum in rome is the largest amphitheatre ever build in the roman empire. It took about eight years to build it and even nearly 2000 years later it is still crowded with people to watch its beauty.

It was originally build to entertain up to 50.000 people with  gladiatorial battles, sea battles, animal hunts, executions and dramas. Today people come here to look at what is left of this masterpiece of architecture.

It took us 30 minutes and a few euros for a ticket to get in, but it is absolutly worth it. This building is amazing and huge.

Huge, yeah that can be a problem. How to catch “huge” in a photo? I tried to do that by showing it all. My only chance to do so was using the fisheye.

If you look at the photos you will notice that this building is full of people, but they are so small that they nearly disapear in this giant arena.

I have to be honest. She is my favourite model. I got some colored background from my sister and brother in law. One of them is this awesome red one you can see on all of these photos.

It took me some time to use it, but last week Martina got her new dresses. I think these look so great, unusual and I like that.

So I decided to take some portraits with her wearing them and I finally used the background for the first time.

I like that combination, what do you thing about it?

I’ve already posted some fisheye HDR photos of Munich here. This time I want to show you another reason why using a fisheye for architecture photography is great.

If you  click the photo on the left, to see the whole thing, you will notice that I was able to capture the whole patio and also the sky above it with just one photo. This is possible, because I used my fisheye and placed the camera on a table in the middle of the patio.

I hope to show you some more architecture photos soon.

Döbriach is a very small village in carinthia at a lake called Millstättersee. It is a very quiet village, but every August a few local enthusiasts organize one of the greatest rock festivals I know.

It is  so great, because it is so different. It is small, I haven’t heard of most of the bands and it is no problem to take your DSRL with you. I took photos while leaning at the stage.

You do not have the chance to take concert photos with a wide angle less very often. At Sauzipf you can get closer to the artist than anyhere else.

It is the perfect festival for Photographers.

ISO high

I shot only RAW, because the lighting is not easy to handle and so I wanted to have all possibilities in postproduction. Afer shooting some photos with flash on I decided to go for a higher ISO and turned the flash off.

The lighting on stage was just too cool to kill it with a flash.

Of course I took a lot more photos than these six photos you can see here. So if you interessted you take a look here -> Sauzipf rocks festival 2012 (set)

Another thunderstorm came closer and so I decided to put my EOS 50D on a tripod near a window and pluged in the remote control.

Patience is what you need, when you are hunting for lightnings. I took me about an hour to get four photos.

Finally I merged them into a single image to make it look more dramatic. The second photo shows raindrops on the window. It is absolutly over exposed, but that’s how I made it look so abstract.

On the final photo you see the landscape outside the window during the storm. I wanted this photo to look a little bit like it was taken with a vintage analog camera. I hope you like it.

Last week Twitter-User @Achisto shared a link about a project called “Picture my Day”. Allthough last friday was the 10th “Picturey my Day”-Day I’ve nerver heard of it before.

After informing myself about it I decided to participate. So I took a lot of photos on this friday documenting my day. These 5 photos show the “highlights” of my day, starting with me wearing my “Bazinga!” t-shirt and dewdrops on a plant on my balcony.

The 3rd photo shows my equipment at work and yes coffee also counts as equipment. After work I went to my parents, because I helped them to take down a big shed. I also made a timelapse video of this, which can be found in my youtube channel.

“Picture my Day” is great. Not only, because it forced me to take some more photos, but also because I found so many great new photoblogs of other creative people joining this project.

As I went into the bathroom I found this little guy. He was sitting on the mirror and ignored me. Good for me, because I had to get my camera and my Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM lens.

He did not move, so I had time to take a few photos of him before I picked him up to bring him back outside.

I have been to Salzburg several times and I took a lot of photos everytime I’ve been there. I took photos like everybody would, but this time I forced myself to find the sights that most people won’t see, although they are in plain sight.

No statues, no church, no museums…

It was a rainy day. So also great “blue sky photos” weren’t an option. I walked through the city and tried to look at things differently, to find the hidden secrets and I found them. The first photo here shows four colorful houses, but whats special about them?

They are build into this massive stone wall. The houses do not stand in front of this wall they are in this wall! This wall separates parts of Salzburg, but there are Tunnels inside to get from one side to the other (photo #2).

Another thing that’s “separates” something can be seen on photo #3. It is one of these nameless cylinders which block the way for cars, so they cannot enter the pedestrian areas during the day.

Photo #4 shows the result of a tradition. It is the handrail of a bridge full of locks. I do not know where this tradition comes from, but it looks like a lot of people are doing this.

Photo #5 shows you a rain pipe in the middle of the Getreidegasse – Salzburg’s famous shopping street. Usually photos of this street show a lot of people shopping under the metal emblems covering the walls of the houses. but I decided to show you a little bird with the tail of a beaver. It is just a sticker, but it is funny and I am pretty sure most of the people won’t recognize it, while they walk through this street.

Leaving tram number 17 in a city with 1.3 million inhabitants – Munich, a city full of life and history. Martina and me, armed with our cameras, enter the botanic garden. It is an enormous park filled with plants from all over the world.

We did not knew where to look first. Everything was so colorful and overloaded with detail. We walked through the paths of this botanic labyrinth without a plan.

“Just looking at things…”

Suddenly we stood in front of a perfect blue lake with alpine ground vegetation. Of course I had to take a photo of it and again it was the fisheye which made it look that great.

Ok, let’s be honest. This is first attempt at doing something like this. I am really bad at manipulating photos, so I decided to start to learn it.

As my first project I wanted to make Martina really small. So I took an older portrait of her and shot a new photo of some flowers I found in the apartment.

That was easy part. Now I “just” had to cut, paste, color, lighting, shadow, detail…      OMG!

It took me hours to produce this and it is far away from perfect or even “good enough”, but I think it is a good “first try”. Good enough for me to go on and try to make some more pictures like this one.

It’s cold outside. Too cold for june, but on May 1st, the day I took these photos, it was warm – spring was here. I walked through Europa Park with Martina and my camera. Everything was green and fresh. Nature was back.

The first photo here shows a tree full of pink blossoms under the perfect blue sky and the sun blasting through the leafs. I think that decribes the mood I was in that day.

My favourit photo of that day is number two – the huge trees near the lake. Look how small the other trees are compared to them. They must have been growing for a hundert years to become this huge.

It was an amazing day and I hope june will get like this soon, because in fact it is summer now, but it feels like late autumn right now.

I like colored walls. The wall we used to take these photos actually is a wall in my apartment. Before we took these photos we went to a forrest for some outdoor portraits (I will post them soon).

After getting home we decided to do something funny. So the girls took some of my shirts and ties and I placed them in front of this green wall. I love this photo of Martina and Nadja in front of the wall looking like they had a really hard night and just got arrested or something like that.

The truth is that this was just a normal photo afternoon with two great models. The other shots do not have this crazy look, but I also like them, because the green background adds a little bit of  ”funny” to every shot.

At the moment I am looking for a cheap and portable background system and colorful backgrounds. I think I need a red and black one, as well as some with patterns. If you have any suggestions for, please let me know and if you have also taken portraits on colored backgrounds and you want to share them with us, feel free to do so in the comments.

On thursday I showed you the first nerd/geek/gamer photos I took last week, but I think this was not enough. So I decided to show you some more.

Until that day I wasn’t aware of a few things. For example I did not know that I have friends who own ninja swords and have hidden circus talents. I planned this as a portrait session, but it turned out to be just a lot of fun with friends.

Conclusion

I like the results a lot. Probably these aren’t the best portraits I’ve taken so far, but I think they show how much fun we had taking them and that’s exactly what I wanted.

Showing the fun of beeing a bit nerdy and just to have fun. Thank guys for beeing such great models!

…and just if you missed it: There is a video of us taking these photos!

We had Posters, Statues, Consoles, really old PCs, Controllers, Games, Swords, angry birds and a plasma ball. Out of all this stuff we build the set.

The best things was that all this stuff is owned by me and the others and therefor no one had to “play a role” this time. Real nerds in their “natural hibitant”.

After some styling destroying their hair I just told them to take a seat in the middle of this chaos and start to play with anything they find around them.

Just a normal afternoon

It took only minutes until I had some really great shots and it got better and better. They started to get rockstars, circus artists and warriors. It was just perfect.

If you want to see how it looked like taking these photos, take a look a this video I made during this afternoon.

More

Of course I took more than these 5 photos, so I will post “the nerdy life part 2″  on thursday.

We were sitting on the terrace when this little guy came by and started watching us.

He was so inquiring that he didn’t even left when I left the terrace to get my camera. He even waited for me to mount the 70-200mm lens.

Probably he was some kind of bird model or something…

Munich is a beautiful city full of great buildungs and places with an enormous mass of detail.

Using a fisheye for architecture photography is great. Allthough the lense somehow disorts the image, it allowed me to capture the whole place at once.

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or HDR) is a set of methods, which allow photographers to capture a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image and therefor is perfect for taking photos of places with complex lighting.

Capturing

The first image shows the interior of a church in Munich. The lighting inside this huge building was very complex. It was a mix of dim natural light shining through the windows and the artificial light of electric lights and candles.

I stood in the back of the church and placed the camera on the tripod. This is important, because if you want to take a HDR photo you have to take a least 3 images of the exact same thing. One with avarage exposure, one that is too bright (long exposure) and one that is too dark (short exposure).

The bright image captures the details in the dark areas, which are black in the avarage one, and the dark image captures details in areas,which are overexposed in the avarage image.

After taking the photos I checked the exposure of each photo to ensure that I really got as much detail as possible.

Walk all day

I wasn’t alone in Munich that time. My girlfriend came with me to discover the city with our cameras. Most of the time we were just walking arround without much of a plan where to go. It was very exhaausting walking for hours and carrying the camera equipment, but it was worth it.

HDR Magic

Back home I transfered all the photos to my PC and started to make tonemapped HDR photos. I used a tool called QTPFSGUI, which is open source, available for windows, linux and Mac and works pretty well with RAW Images. All of the photos in this post where created using this tool.

The funny thing  about taking HDR photos is that until you see the final result produced by the Software, you do not really know how it will look, so you better be careful while taking photos for this purpose.

Macrophotography is allways something special. It’s like looking into a totaly unknown microcosmos. It is the art of capturing details that can not be seen with our eyes.
I have taken hundreds of photos of flowers and insects, but this time I wanted to capture not only the bees. I wanted to show them in motion. These photos show these little honey collectors at work, hovering between flowers.
There was just one problem. Like most of time I decided to do so very spontainous and I wasn’t prepared for this. My macro lens, a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM, was at home. So I decided to use my Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM.
I love this lense for taking event and sport photos, but it is not my first choice for macros. This time I had no other choice, because the other lense I had was a Canon 17-40mm L USM and a wide angle was no option for this purpose.
I sat on the ground next to a huge bush full of bees. It was a sunny afternoon and so I was able to take photos with very short exposure. I switched the auto focus mode to high speed, so I was able to take several photos per second and I produced a lot of photos of the same bee while it was hovering.
This was very important, because I took several hundred photos and I only got 3 good ones of bees hovering.

I was at the lake to take some photos with friends in the afternoon as I saw these two boats. They do not look like they will ever be used again, but the  natural light and the red stripes on the building, looked so perfect together that I had to take some photos of it.

I like this photo so much that I ordered myself a poster print of it. I hope you like it too.

I was driving to Salzburg with Martina last weekend. We decided not to drive on the highway. So we chose a route that guided us through Feldkirchen, Turrach, Obertauern, Radstadt and finally to Salzburg.

On our way through the austrian alps we saw lot’s of beautiful mountains, bridges and landscapes. I think, if I go to Salzburg again I will take this route again even if it is a little longer, but it is much more interessting.

We stopped somewhere in Lungau as we saw this great mountain under this perfect blue sky. It is only one of many things that looked that great along our way, but this is my favourit.

I love cooking. I cook nearly every evening at home for my girlfriend and me and as you know I am writing for cookinggeeks.tumblr.com.

Molecular cooking however was something completly new for me. You make practical use of the physical and chemical transformations of ingredients that occur while cooking.

Many people think molecular cooking has always something todo with CO2, but that’s not true. Of course we learned how to cook using CO2, but for me making bubbles out of nearly everything and Pina Colada cubes was much more interessting and had nothing to do with CO2.

Colorful, extraodinary, funny. That’s how I would describe molecular cooking now.

I will try to make some of the things I’ve learned at home, but first I have to order some of the necessary ingedients.