Schönenwerd

Yesterday, my mum and I decided to go on a spontaneous trip to Schönenwerd in Solothurn Switzerland. First of all, we wanted to get out and enjoy the first warm and beautiful spring day this year, secondly, I wanted to look at a furniture store there and last but not least, we heard that there was a beautiful park there. And we were not wrong! It is a lovely place, but there is not that much to see except that park, the river Aare and the old factory buildings. Oh and don't forget that nuclear power plant in the background xD

Midnight trip to Ticino

Sunday, two weeks ago, my friend and I decided to go to Ticino. But it wasn’t quite the usual trip. We left at around seven PM and arrived at one thirty on Monday morning. We took this day off at school just to take pictures of the stars.

For preparation, we checked out some light pollution maps and saved three different spots. One of them was near Vals at a lake which certainly would have given some cool shots of the stars with reflections of them in the lake. The second one was on top of Gotthard mountain, where there’s a road going over it. And the third one, well, was quite some more hours away down some Valley in Ticino.

The reason we’ve decided to go there for our little photography exhibition was that I’ve checked could maps on my laptop while we were driving down there. But the only one of the three places without clouds obviously had to be the one furthest away from where we left! Well, it was totally worth it!

Besides having temperatures at night around 20 degrees Celsius we had a crystal-clear sky with no light pollution anywhere! We even slept outside in our sleeping bags and it was quite warm.

And the best thing was that we’ve, accidentally, landed in the Verzasca Valley, a very famous touristic spot which is normally flooded with people during the day. But since we slept there, we were literally the first people wandering around the cold river and taking pictures :D

Starting a new Instrument and new Lightning Pictures

For a very long time I have been wanting to learn a new instrument and now it's finally time! I took an exam in school (which was surprisingly easy) to get free lessons for a new instrument.
I chose the Flügelhorn. It's a very mellow horn/trumpet and I love the sound of it! And now I just need some time to practise :)

Yesterday evening, after a BigBand concert, there were heavy thunderstorm warnings in our region. So of course I grabbed my camera again and took some more pictures of the lightnings; avoiding the errors I've made last time...
And then it started raining and with the rain showers the real lightnings started to appear outside. I could not resist, got myself a plastic bag, made a hole in it and put it over my camera (leaving the lens free) to protect it from the rain. In addition with a bit of strong duct-tape the plastic bag was a perfect solution!
So I was standing outside, the rain hitting my face, soaking wet, taking pictures of lightnings :D awesome!

A little bit of lightning photography

Last week there were so many thunderstorms in our region. And I love them! I love sitting outside and watching the lightnings striking the ground. So I decided, since a friend asked me how I took these pictures in an older post, and I decided to take some more...

It's not an easy task because you need to check a lot of things and watch that your camera does not get wet if there's any rain. I often use the Interval-Time-Shooting mode on my Nikon. If you make, let's say a half minute exposure, you can tell the camera to start taking a picture again as soon as the last one is finished :)

In the end I had so many pictures but there were just two quite nice ones: