Mathias Joschika

In this series I try to show you how I took some of my pictures in my portfolio. You will get to know the gear and settings I used, as well as a little back story of how and why the image was created.

Enough introduction - let's get it on!

Gear			Settings
Body:	Sony a7ii		Shutter Speed:	1/30
Lens:	Sony 28mm 2.0		Aperture:	11
Flash:	None		Focal Length:	28mm
Filter:	3 Stop Soft GND		ISO:	100

Spontaneous sessions sometimes really pay of.

This spot is super accessible and is also easy to squeeze in between other appointments your daily life throws at you. After coming home from a multi day work assignment, I decided to head up there and enjoy the sunset.

Even though I used a 3 Stop GND, I still had to do a bracketed shot, because the dynamic range of the scene was way to big. I wanted to get as much detail as possible in the clouds as well as in the valley. What use is a nice sunset with a lot of black underneath it?
For everyone interested: I combined the shots using Lightrooms HDR Merge module.

Some of you might ask: Why did you use a 3 Stop GND and not a darker one? That is an easy answer: I only own one GND. Even if I had a darker one, I probably still would have struggled with the foreground and the valley.

In this series I try to show you how I took some of my pictures in my portfolio. You will get to know the gear and settings I used, as well as a little back story of how and why the image was created.

Enough introduction - let's get it on!

Gear			Settings
Body:	Sony a7ii		Shutter Speed:	1/125
Lens:	Sony 75-300 4.5-5.6 + LA-EA3		Aperture:	20
Flash:	None		Focal Length:	160mm
Filter:	None		ISO:	100

Scenes like this are the reason why I love landscape photography.

After days of sitting in the fog I finally found the time go get out and up the mountains. I hoped for an image like this so I packed my only telephoto lens I have - a cheap Sony SAL 75-300 4.5-5.6 with an LA-EA3 adapter.

When I arrived at the top I was greeted with a view you would call: WHITE! Oh how I loved the fog in that moment... Hiking up and getting exactly the view you DO NOT want.

But I was lucky. The fog and the view were exchanging their place every minute.
Just for your imagination: I couldn't create a panorama because after one or two images I had to wait for the fog to dissolve again. And even then, the exposure changed dramatically.

So I set up my tripod and pointed my camera roughly in the direction where I knew the valley would be. That is definitely not so easy when all you see is white! After a couple minutes the fog cleared enough for me to frame the shot and get my composition right.

I shot a couple of images in rapid succession because I wasn't sure if the fog would clear again. Unfortunately, my fears were right and I left back home again.

Nonetheless I got the shot I wanted and it is currently sitting as a 60x40cm print in its black frame.