Hello Steemians! :)

Uhhh...hi!

I'm using Steemit for about 2 weeks now and finally decided to write a proper introduction post.

I'm a 29 year old German guy who finished his Masters in Computer Science 2 years ago, and started working as a software developer - currently for Mobile Apps. My real passion, however, is photography. It is for me the perfect mix between my inner tech geek and art. Being able to express myself while also optimizing my equipment and going full nerd about the latest camera specs is really satisfying. I also love to be in nature and like sharing my experiences - hence my favourite categories are landscapes and macros.

My other hobbies include (but are not limited to) my kid(soon to be more than 1 :) ), mountainbiking, playing guitar, reading, books and ... coffee. My blog will mostly deal with photography however.

While I started photographing with an analog SLR back then, my interest in photography really started to develop with my first DSLR back in 2010.

This is one of the earliest images with my DSLR. It's interesting to see how my editing changed over time - nowadays it's a lote more than just boosting the saturation and contrast :)

A year after that, I also started looking into astrophotography. I'm really amazed by everything that's out there in the universe - being able to stand somewhere on the field in the middle of the night, with absolute silence and just experience the open sky is breathtaking.

This is my very first attempt of the Orion Nebula from 2011. This was shot with a standard 200mm lens and a tripod.

The main challenge with astrophotography is earth's rotation. Back then I was amazed that the maximum exposure length I could use were 1.6s with my 200mm lens - wow. This really limits the amount of light you can gather.

Adding equipment that cancels out earth's rotation was the key to creating stunning images. I now have a mount that rotates around itself exactly as fast as earth does. Aligning the mount so that its own rotation axis is parallel to earth's rotation axis increases your maximum exposure time by up to several minutes. Here's the same region with 60s exposure time, which is about 40x as much, with the same lens.

Same lens but now with 60s exposure length, up from 1.6s

While Astrophotography can be really magical, it's also veeeeery time consuming. Recently my spare time suffered a lot (Is that a diplomatic enough way of saying "I started working and where the fuck is all my time" ? :) ), that's why all my astrophotography stuff came to a halt two years ago. Most of my recent shots are therefore daylight shots, like this one below, that I took on my very recent trip to some high plateau with awesome stone formations.

One of my most recent images. I like how the processing visibly differs from my earlier shots.

I'd really love to share my experiences with you and pass on the tips&tricks I acquired over the years. I already found that being part of the community really helps motivating myself on days where I'd rather sit on the couch.

Please drop me a comment if you want to have someone to talk about photography (Or coffee...I like coffee.), want to share criticism or just follow my photographic journey.

If you're interested, you can also check out my latest image or my latest travel report or take a look at my blog.

Thanks for your time :)