Earlier this Month, I visited a friend of mine in northern Bavaria, or as he likes to correct me: OBERFRANKEN. I stayed there just for a weekend but brought WAAAY TOO MUCH photography gear.

He made the mistake of telling me he’d like to try some macro photography. Therefore I brought two cameras ( technically four… ), a handful of lenses including two macro lenses, and a bunch of vintage lenses for ✨character ✨.

As it is tradition, I neither used a single vintage lens, nor did we do any macro photography at all.

Nevertheless, I still managed to take some pictures that I deem worth showing at the time of writing, one of which you can see on the right (or underneath if you’re on mobile i suppose).

Just before the sun went down on the first evening, we hiked up the steps to an old ruin in the forest. There, I decided that a wide angle landscape shot was too busy and too boring. Therefore took this photo with 140mm on a 70-200 with a 2x Teleconverter, which I evidently did not need for it.

The Heat

On the second day, I went out around noon on my own. If I remember correctly, it was around 40°C+ and for whatever reason I decided I needed to go out and find some interesting subjects. My friend, however, stayed inside as he and the sun are not friends.

While wandering around the agriculture access paths among the fields (which are mostly without any shade because.. well.. FIELDS….) I found just a handful of subjects I deemed worthy of a photo.

This tells me that I need to get better at finding subjects and compositions as I am sure there were hundreds out there that I did not see.

The best of these subjects, in my opinion, was these two storks. One of them stood still, while the other walked up and down the field, probably in search of something edible.

Since I did not want to step through the field and provoke the wrath of the local farmer, I stayed on the path next to the field and wished that I actually took the damn teleconverter this time.

During Editing I chose then to leave most of the negative space since it seemed to make for a more interesting image than a tight crop on the storks. What do you think?

At night we headed out again to look for a valley spot with low ambient lighting. The day before, we went for a late night walk and could see an order of magnitude more stars than my metropolis polluted eyes ever saw. Therefore, improvised “astro” photography was on today’s menu.

Did I have any clue or the right gear? Probably no to both but we tried anyways.

Now witness the best shot i got that night after realizing that just turning the focus wheel all the way to the limit on my 24-70mm does not mean that the stars are in focus.

Apparently after “focus on infinity” there is a “nothing is sharp” setting… Who would have thought…

I contemplated clone stamping out the one continuous light in the center but ultimately decided against it, as in the future we will have even more streaks and stripes in our footage. Thanks Elon.

I also was not the biggest fan of the clouds rolling in and considered waiting them out, but after an hour of standing in a cold valley next to a field and with more clouds coming, we decided to call it a night.

To save the best for last, I skipped over one of my favorite encounters during the trip.

While leaving the house on the evening of day two, we met this little gentleman. His name is Goliath and he is the cat of one of my friend’s neighbors.

While looking very distinguished in this image, we later discovered that he is, professionally speaking, just a lil guy, a little floof, a cuddly beby.

Most of day three was spent with some editing and sitting out the heat. The weather took all motivation to move from me and therefore I packed all my gear back in the car, took a really unnecessary shower before sitting in my heat-soaked car for the next six hours, said my goodbyes and hit the road.

While most of my remarks in this post might sound negative and unhappy about the situation or the pictures I took, this is just a symptom of my humor.

While the weather was extremely hot and borderline unbearable, it was generally a very relaxing and fun trip and i was happy to see my friend one more time this year : )

Now it would be cruel to hint at the sweet nature of probably everyone’s favorite photo subject, Mr. Goliath, without providing some more evidence. So to end this post, I will leave you with a little gallery of some more cat.

I hope this post was at least entertaining, if not informational to you.