Fireworks

As many of you know, it's New Year's Eve! (ha, ha).
In The Netherlands, basically everyone will buy their own fireworks and then
watch them when it's 12, midnight. I'm going out, so sadly, I can't take any photos of
the fireworks. I did buy some myself so I could light them before I'm going out.

I used the exact same method used on the photo with the car-lights. A long shutter speed, low aperture and the ISO at 100.

This is one of the photos I took of a thing that spun around on a stick.

Macro Photography.

Another lovely way to shoot great photos is to take them from a close-up view. This technique is also called Macro Photography. This type of photography is usually made with a DSLR and a special Macro-lens. These lenses can be really expensive, but photos like the ones you see of ants, can be really quite impressive.
Whenever I try and shoot some close-up photos I usually use a Tele-lens. Zoom in a bit, manual focus to the closest point you can get and walk towards the sub/object until it's in focus. This will usually get the same effect. This is also why most tele-lenses are called tele/macro, because they basically have both capabilities. A proper macro-lens will give the best results, of course, but it's a good way of trying this particular type of photography.

You don't always need the best and/or expensive equipment to get a good result. The photo below was made with the Canon EOS 1100D and the standard 18-55mm kit-lens:

Light Trails

A few months ago when I started to really get into photography, I saw some photos of Light Trails.
For the people who don't know what light trails are:

Light trails are the, well, trails of light you see in dark, night-time photos of for example the lights of cars. 


Since then I had to know how to take those kinds of photographs. So I started looking online and asking friends at college who are also into photography.
I figured out that when you have the shutter speed set to a really high number,  the camera will basically record for the amount of seconds you have set the shutter speed to. That's also why in low-lit areas, some photos might look smudgy without a tripod. (This is basically because the camera will have set a longer shutter speed to get more light on the chip.) Then when you set the aperture to a number like f/22, which means that there will barely get any light through the lens to the chip, you will in the right place, get this effect.

The long shutter speed will result in lots of light on the chip, but the low aperture will result in not much light coming through anyway. With these settings you will get these light trails but not actually having lots of overexposure. The ISO will usually be set to a low number like 100, 200 to avoid overexposure and what's even more important: no, or a minimum amount of noise.


You'll have to play with these three settings to get the photo you want. over- and underexposure can look good but you'll have to be aware of these, especially with light trails, since they can really mess up the photo.

Here's a photo I took from the top of a friend's apartment of a junction in the middle of the city.
Tell me what you think about this photo or the subject: Light trails, in the comment section.

Welcome to my freshly made blog!

Let's take a second to introduce myself:

My name is Sander Marskamp and I'm currently residing in The Netherlands, Europe.
I'm a 'Communicationsystems' student in Groningen and at the moment I'm really
interested in the art of Photography. A few months ago I got my proper DSLR,
a Canon EOS 1100D and the amount of lenses I have are already at 3:

• The standard Canon 18-55mm kitlens,
• The Canon 50mm f/1.8,
• And a Tamron 70-300mm telelens.
  

I really like taking photos of mysterious objects, and prefer it in the dark.
Light trails really attract my attention since they're something real and in the other hand
completely surreal. It really amazes me.

More about this blog:
This blog will be my place to post anything about photography when I think it'll be interesting
for the online community. I will post photos, reviews and i will also tell the stories behind the photos.
I hope you'll enjoy reading this blog as much as I am making it and comments would be much
appreciated. I am never done learning. :)