About me
Gerhard Aust
1984 Born in Münsingen, a small town in Baden Württemberg, South Germany
2004 Finished secondary school (Abitur) near Nuremberg, Bavaria
2010 Graduated from TU Dresden (Industrial Engineering, Dipl.-Wi.-Ing.)
2011 Adoption of a cute little English Cocker Spaniel named Charly :-)
2012 Marriage to Katja, who fortunately tolerates my hobby with great patience
2014 Completed Ph.D. at Faculty of Business and Economics, TU Dresden
2014 Launch of my photography website www.gerhard-aust.de
2017 Project Manager at Prettl Electronics GmbH
2018 Birth of our two little princesses Isabella and Lilly
2019 Head of Account and Project Management at Prettl Electronics Lübeck GmbH
2022 Managing Director at Prettl Electronics Lübeck GmbH
Together with my wife Katja and our dog Charly, I have been living in Dresden since 2004. With its wonderful baroque skyline and the Saxony Switzerland nearby, it is really a great city for living, working, and taking photos! I am especially interested in landscape, nature, and travel photography, but I have also numerous pictures of Charly in my collection!
My first own digital camera was a Canon Powershot G3, which I received as a gift for completing my Abitur back in 2004. Thanks to its great image quality and its possibility to use manual mode, I soon got infected with the photographer’s virus… Consequently, I updated my camera by various filters, tele and wideangle converters in the following years, which made my camera bag increase significantly—at least for such a compact camera. I shooted mostly macros of insects and flowers in my parents’ garden at that time and of course landscapes and cityscapes during traveling. Despite being really satisfied with this camera, my desire for a new and better camera grew over the years (I suppose that every hobby photographer knows this feeling!), and so I retired my good old G3 after 5 years and more than 50,000 (!!!) pictures.
The dignified replacement was a Canon EOS 7D DSLR, which I bought 2009 during my six-month internship in Hallein (Austria). It’s needless to say that I was excited! But those new potentials had also one big disadvantage: The need (or desire) for new accessories and lenses was not really reduced… :-) One most welcome excuse for buying new stuff like an ultrawideangle lens (my beloved EF-S 10-22mm) was our trip to Australia after our studies in 2011. Another important gain was a set of Graduated Neutral Density Filters, which definitely changed my way of photography. I learned about this “serious” way of taking photos from the very famous Picture-of-the-day-thread in the German DSLR-Forum, where three German landscape photographers explained how they took their incredibible pictures. Hence, I spent hours on searching photo locations on Google Earth and sites of other photographers before our trip to Australia, and tried to be on location at the right time. To my wife Katja’s regret, right time in landscape photography means essentially the hours around sunrise or sunset… Together with the correct application of filters and the use of a tripod, I am sure that this took my photography on a higher level!
So far the last step of my vita as a hobby photographer was my change to a full frame DSLR in 2013—the Canon EOS 5D Mark III. The trigger (or better, the alibi) for that was again a trip, this time to the Lofoten in Northern Norway in February 2014, where we wanted to shoot the aurora borealis. Despite of the unusual warm weather, it was a great experience and northern lights are really a must-see and must-photograph! But the upgrade was not only worth it with respect to the better High-Iso abilities for the northern lights: I have to say that I’m really happy that I made this change, nonwithstanding the related high expenses. The image quality and the possibility to use better lenses is simply amazing!
Since then, our holidays have been concentrated more and more on photogenic destinations, with our four weeks trip through Patagonia and Atacama in 2016 being the highlight so far. In the meantime, my camera gear was further increased and upgraded, and even during our yearly hiking trip in the Alps I cannot withstand taking at least 3-4 lenses, my tripod and some filters with me…
Thank you for your interest in my pictures. Hope you enjoy them!
Gerhard Aust
