Morning Walk

Normally I don't like Monday mornings at all. The weekend is past, it´s back to work, not enough time to spend on my passion and so on and so on.
But last Monday was different. It was a bank holiday in Germany and nothing on the plan.

The whole week I had been driving to work and passing a landscape and thinking to myself that one day I might come out in the morning and try and capture this on the SD card.
Why wait I thought to myself. After all you never know what is going to happen.
So I followed the weather forecast all weekend long and after a great Saturday at the Holi Festival of Colours I was quite sure that the weather would be on my side.

Sunday came along and it just rained all day long. Oh shoot. That´s it. Monday won´t be good photography weather at all. But wait. The forecast does not look that bad at all.
Sunny in the morning with a few clouds and drawing in by the afternoon. Who cares about the afternoon? I need the morning sun. The golden hour.

The plan was there. OK I said to myself and my wife. "Dear! I am going to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to take some pictures."
"Do as you wish, but please let me sleep" my wife replied. Not a problem for me. After all I am the one that wants to get up so early.

Right then time to get everything ready!
Charge the batteries.
Make sure the SD Cards are all in place.
Clean the lenses.
Set up the cameras.
Get the tripod.



That was on Sunday.

Monday morning 5am the alarm went of. Oh damn who had this stupid idea to get up this early on a free day? Oh wait. PHOTOGRAPHY was the one.

OK, OK Let´s see what the weather is like then. I pealed myself out of bed and went into the next room to pull up the jalousie and take a look outside.

Not a cloud in the sky and the color of the sky was a faint blue with some tints of red and orange.
Perfect.

I got ready grabbed all the gear I wanted to take and headed off to this beautiful landscape I passed every morning on my way to work.

As I arrived the sun was just starting to rise above the horizon. I quickly set up the camera. In this case it was the Fuji X-E1 with the 18-55 Zoom lens. Mounted it on my tripod and started to shoot.

Actually the first shot I took was taken with the Fuji X100S

Just in time.
Lets see then what other lenses I have in the bag. There is the awesome Fuji 35mm 1.4 in there. Mmmhh not wide enough for landscapes really.
Oh wait what is this tucked down on the side.

Of course, I completely forgot about this one. I still have the Walimex 8mm fisheye lens. Ok I know it has this fisheye effect of course but if I keep the horizon going through the middle of the lens it will not be that bad.

And then I discovered why I love, love, love this lens so much.

 It is wide. I mean really wide. So wide you have to make sure your own feet are not on the picture.

All the time I was shooting along I had the Fuji X100S hanging of my shoulder just ready to take a snap.
And that is just what happened. Every know and then I grabbed it and took a shot.

The most fun this morning was going wide with the X-E1 and the fisheye lens mounted. It is so crazy what you can capture with this lens.
It is easy to use. Just set the aperture to f/8 and the distance to 2m and snap of. Be happy and carry on.
The color rendition and sharpness of this lens is just crazy. Especially if you remember what you pay for it.

After shooting so wide all the time I decided to grab the X100S and take some pictures with this little beast. The problem was that the 23mm lens is very tight compared with the Walimex 8mm.
The only thing to do was to screw on the WCL-X100 on the front of the X100S.
And that is what I did.

By that time the sunlight was starting to get a little harder and the lighting was not as nice anymore. I decided to call it a day and go back home again. By that time it was 7am in the morning.
Still pretty early for a day off.

The last shot I am going to show you is a "Behind the Scene" shot where the Fuji X-E1 and the 18-55mm lens is mounted on the tripod waiting to capture the stunning light.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog entry and the time to look at my pictures.

All pictures are jpeg´s ooc with some slight tweaks in Aperture.
I also used the VSCO toolkit on some of them.

Is the Walimex fisheye lens capable of taking great landscape shots?
Do you like the shots I took?
Leave a comment if you wish.