I'm back from almost a three week lasting break... During this time I gathered quite some shots that I hopefully will be uploading in the next days: Two weeks ago, I've spent a day visting Freiburg, which is not only known for being one of the sunniest places in Germany, but also turned out to be a great location for shooting.

But before showing images from Freiburg I probably will show some of my experiments from the past few day. Looking at the title of today's posting, one can guess that I somehow "extended" my photographic equipment. I was hesitating for a long time whether to buy the Canon 5D MKii or not... yeah, well, in the end I decided to buy...? a Manfrotto 055 XPROB tripod and a Novoflex VR-System PRO II. Not quite a 5D MKii, but my 30D still works perfectly, so I not really am in need of a new camera. Since I, however, always wanted to get more (even MORE?! now how is that supposed to be possible) into panoramic photography, I ended up spending money for a nodal point adaptor, which, eventually, will help me to get rid of parallax effects while shooting multi-column and multi-row images.. YAY!

First thoughts about the Novoflex adaptor: Since it isn't really the most affordable gizmo, I had very high expectations. Well, build quality is exceptional — I don't think the screws and things will ever wear off — BUT: my wide angle lenses (Sigma 10-20, Canon 17-40L) are too big for that bloody thing! When attaching the lenses to my 30D, the latter can't be fixed to the rail clip, as the lenses' diameter is too large! Or is just my camera too small? Anyway, I'll have to put an additional plate between my 30D and the Novoflex rail clip... or get a 5Dii, hoping it is larger than my 30D?

Still, I wanted to have some fun with this new equipment. And since the Canon 50mm fits perfectly, I decided to have some more attempts at "Digital (Fake) Large Format Photography", i.e. shooting a mosaic of about 25 images at a moderate focal length, and stitching the resulting images into a 140 Megapixel image!