Greetings from Germany!

Mattis · Mar 13, 2015

Hello!

I'm Mathias from Germany, and since it is a slow day at work I decided to register here.

I started with photography in late 2012. I always wanted to do something art related, but since my artistic skills never evolved past stick figures I figured that I'd give photography a go. And so far it has worked out pretty well for me and I enjoy it a lot!
My first camera was a Nikon D3200 which I bought with the standard 18-55mm kit lens. It served me well as a starting point and I got a few lenses for it, but as an entry level camera it felt a little limiting after about a year. I was still happy with the image quality, it just wasn't big enough for my huge man-hands and I was interested in the older lenses that need the internal AF motor in the camera.
So in December 2013 I got a D7000 and I've been happy with it ever since.
Soon after that I bought my first bigger lens, a roughly 20 years old Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 which I still love dearly.

Tiger by Mathias Appel, on Flickr

As for things that I like to shoot, I like to experiment a lot.
For example, I tried my hands on high speed drop photography:

Drops by Mathias Appel, on Flickr

Drop shot by Mathias Appel, on Flickr

A little hard to get into, but very rewarding.

And as of late I went to different zoos a lot, I've always been kind of an animal freak so "shooting" critters is a lot of fun for me as well.
For this I also recently got an older Sigma 300mm f/4 which is just awesome:

Tiger by Mathias Appel, on Flickr

Anyway! This forum seems to be pretty active, so I'm sure I'll have some fun here.

Take care and thanks for reading!
Mathias

goooner · Mar 13, 2015

Welcome Matthias. Some very nice shots to start off with. Love the droplets shots!

Mattis · Mar 13, 2015

goooner said:
Welcome Matthias. Some very nice shots to start off with. Love the droplets shots!

Thanks a lot! Those drop shots are fun to make, they just need a lot of equipment and preparation so I didn't do those in quite a while because I didn't have the time.
I'd highly recommend looking into it if you are interested though. The possibilities are pretty much endless with those. I mean, I just used one valve, the "drop pros" use three to five valves, compressed air, pellet rifles... It's crazy what you can do with that.

Edit: I really like that this forum shows similar threads at the bottom! It's a nice demonstration how unoriginal my thread title is ;D