Old Kodak camera (taken with the Sigma 14mm lens)

On sunday we went to a camera bourse in Frankfurt. It was fun, fascinating and interesting. A lot of old stuff, partly usable, partly unusable, partly interesting, a lot of lenses, used analog and digital cameras, filters, strange equipment, books, old magazines and so on. I think the oldest “camera equipment” were some Laterna Magica and glass plate “cameras” with the appearance of a wooden box.

We bought some protection filter for our lenses and a +10 close up filter for the Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-55 1:3,5-5,6G, which can be used this way as a poor man’s macro lens and it works fine. I tried close up filter (+2, +3 and +4) with my 18-200mm zoom lens last year but — as I read in a review — the results are interesting because of the soft blurriness, but not comparable with real macro shots. This orchid is slightly motion blurred, I did use a tripod but not a remote control to release the shutter and it was just to get an impression what can be done with this +10 close up filter. The colorful structure of this flower is not much bigger than 1 cm.

Sigma 14mm 2.8D HSM

But the highlight was this Sigma 14mm f/2.8 wide angle lens. I really like wide angle photographs. And I miss it as the 18mm of my zoom lens results in effective 27mm because of the Nikon DX crop factor. The lens looks great and feels great, it is built of metal and really heavy glass. There is notable chromatic abberation at the outer areas using lower f-stops but the sharpness is great. The distortion is not extreme (I don’t want a fish eye effect). And you can get really close to a subject with this lens. Up to a few centimeters.

Wide angle landscape on my way to work (taken with the Sigma 14mm lens)

We passed a few days in the swiss alps around new year. We stayed in Thun, near Interlaken in the Berner Oberland and went for excursions in the Jungfrau Region. It was great. Actually, this region is part of the UNESCO cultural heritage “Jungfrau - Aletsch - Bietschhorn”, the most glaciated part of the Alps.

Really great snow and wonderful wother. And in spite of my ISO mistake (I forgot to turn it down to 200 and let it at 1600 the first day after new year’s eve…) I got some not so bad pictures I want to share here. The ISO performance of my new Nikon D90 is not bad. There is a noticable difference im comparison to my D70s I used before.

I took some series to build panoramas, too. And this is the most beautiful one I think. I spent some time in creating sharpening masks and blur masks to reduce the noise in the sky (caused by my ISO 1600…) without losing details. And at least for this size it works I think.

Panorama of Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger

This is the view over the Jungfrau with Mönch and Eiger on the left of the panorama. The very left one is the Eiger.

Eiger Nordwand and a schematic map of the region

They built a cog rauilroad called “Jungfraubahn” from little Scheidegg to the Junfraujoch, which is a hotel, a restaurant and certainly a great panorama viewpoint. They call it “Top of Europe”, although the hightest european mountain is the Montblanc. Anyway, the railroad they built in 1912 is quite impressive as they even made a station or two with windows in the Eiger Nordwand! We did not go up as it is really expensive to go there. The cablecars to the places whe went were expensive enough. But I want to go some day. Hopefully with a similar weather.

We had the chance to watch a roaring avalanche on the other side of the valley. It was quite far away and in the shadow. The sound needed a few seconds until arriving to our side of the valley. Nevertheless impressioning. We were on the way down with sledges from little Scheidegg (over 2000m) (which is directly in front of the Eiger Nordwand) to Wengern.

The weather in the valley was ugly. Cold, dark and gray. But as we went up we encountered with the sun. I love those seas of clouds! The clouds were at about 1300m, which is exaclty the altitude of Wengern. The upper village had nice weather, the lower part had really bad and cold weather. You can see this on the third photo of the three below. This was the upper limit of the clouds. A few meters below the temperature dropped noticable.

High fog in Wengern

The last day we visited Thun and Bern. I published one of the photos of Bern in a previous blog entry.

Another one of the photos I took in Frankfurt. Not sure if I really like this photo. Hope you like it.

Winter in Frankfurt

RAW processed with UFRaw, adjusted and sharpened with Gimp.
This photo on Flickr

I was in Frankfurt city yesterday and I had a look on the Main, which is frozen a few dozens of kilometers upriver. As the day before was the first day for almost two weeks when the temperature climbed above 0°C it seems the some of the ice broke and drifted downstream.

Leaving the ice

It was snowing.

The thermometer of our neighbours showed -12.1°C. This thermometer is just at the outside of the wall. The coldest night in the last seven years in Hesse. My fingers get too cold riding (by bike) my 2 km from the train station to work that it hurt. We had about -17°C outside the villages.

But the sunrise was fascinating. A shame that I have no time to go to a place to take pictures of the industrial zones near here. With those temperatures the smoke of the chimneys looks impressive.