Hi, my name is Finn Semmer. I'm a 21 years old student and photographer from Berlin. I got my first camera about two years ago when I turned 18. Since then I've rarely been out without a tripod and camera ready to take some pictures. Photography has now developed into a real passion, for which I also like to drive through half of Europe, hike through mountains or stay awake all night long. 

In addition to occasional photo trips to the Dolomites, the Baltic Sea or Switzerland, I study civill engineer at the Technical University of Berlin. You can certainly imagine that it is not an easy task to unite such a complex study and photograph.

How did I come to put all my money and a lot of time and energy into photography? Well, it all started about four years ago, when I was 16 and on a vacation with my family. We were in Norway for the first time and explored untouched nature there for two weeks. Breathtaking sunsets, great forests and impressive mountains tempted me to take my parent's camera and just take a few photos. Little did I know at the time that photography would develop into a real passion. Back home, I started taking photos with a friend in the forest using our parent's camera. We watched countless YouTube videos from other photographers and tried out for ourselves what you could do with a camera. I still remember dreaming of owning my own camera one day. Through a lot of trying and watching videos, the initial snapshots slowly turned into good photos. Not to be compared with the photos of professional photographers, but still better than a simple cell phone photo. Over time I learned more and more about how to edit RAW photos, what time of day it is best to take photos, how to choose the perspective and which lenses to use and when. Even now I'm still learning!

If I'm not taking photos or sitting in lectures, I climb, ride  mountain bike with friends, go skiing in the mountains or sail on the Baltic Sea.

Sice my beginning of photography I am a huge fan of Canon. My first camera was a Sony bridge camera. A bridge camera is the middle ground between an SLR camera and a compact camera. She tries to combine the best of two worlds. With this camera I started to make my first landscape photos. I started following other photographers on YouTube, trying to understand how they took photos and what equipment they used. A bridge camera has the advantage that it covers a large focal length (600mm in my case), but was not very flexible in terms of ultra wide and aperture. For my 18th birthday I got my first system camera, the Canon EOS R together with the 24-105 f/4 RF. 

From that moment to this day I started spending my savings on tripods, filters, memory cards as well as photo backpacks and lenses. In the meantime, I mainly take photos with the Canon EOS R5. My favorite lenses for landscape photography are the Canon 14-35 f/4 and the RF 100-500 f/4.5-7.1. If the conditions allow it, I like to use the Nisi ND filters to give my picture more dynamics through longer exposure times. My equipment is transported in an f-stop tilopa. This is a backpack specially designed for photographers and has a volume of 50 liters. 

I like to shoot with a tripod, even if you're not quite as flexible, I have the feeling that you can take better photos with it, because you take more time to isolate a scene and compose your picture properly.