Landscapes

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13
Mar 10

Remember the milk… and the compact

Last weekend we finally went skiing again – cross country, of course. Being inspired by so many hours of wonderful HD Vancouver coverage, and the awesome winter weather out there, we booked a room in a little hotel in the Tannheim valley in Austria, less than 2 hours drive from Munich.

Guess what happened? Arriving on Sunday afternoon in the best of all possible sun flooded winter snows, we hit the track and had a great time. Next morning, things were even getting better – after one of the coldest nights of the year with temperatures way below -20° C (that’s -5° F), the sun came out and everything – and I mean really everything – was covered by the thickest hoar frost I have ever seen. And since last year I’m in love with hoar frost, remember?

We did a great tour of about 18 km through this wonderful landscape, and I’d love to show you photos – but I can’t, because while I had packed the huge Lowepro backpack with D300 and everything, I just forgot the tiny little Canon ixus 40 on my desk. Was too small. Just overlooked it in the huge pile of equipment I packed. I briefly considered taking the D300, but the >1 kg monster including lens was not suited for cross-contry, neither was the Computrekker Plus backpack. That is certainly not suited for any kind of sports, as it’s just barely ok for airplane travel.

Quickly decided to rathermore enjoy the scenery without taking pictures – only thing I can share of this perfect afternoon is our track. For more interest on geo-tagging and GPS data workflows, you’re invited to revisit my previous posts on this topic.

Wow, I just found a new feature in Google Earth 5.1 I had not noticed in it’s significance: It has a button for “Show sunlight across the landscape”. You can select date and time of day, and it will render the light. This could come in handy to predict cool photo spots in a mountainous landscape. Below the simulated phase of the Haldensee lake we touched on our ski tour at the time of day the sun dips below the first mountain range. This is certainly something I have to try in the future.

haldensee-simulation

Next day, of course, no hoar frost anymore and the sun showed itself a little less generous. Did ski, but the photos we took later that afternoon are really everything but impressive in terms of light. Look how flat the light is with snow and high fog… This is the (frozen) Haldensee lake, looking back from the position indicated on the track map towards the “camera” of the Google Earth picture shown above. The track across the lake was closed, for the ice obviously not being trusted after the prior weekend’s foehn.

haldensee

Lesson learned: Sometimes, less is more. And don’t be so stupid to leave the small camera at home.

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Landscapes / Workshops — No Comments
8
Feb 09

Workshop report: Winter Magic (part II)

This is the second part of the workshop review “Winter Magic”. In case you have missed part I, you can find it here.

Now, after lunch, which at least for my part meant a delicious Kaiserschmarrn, a sweet pancake-based dish famous in Austria and Bavaria, the real challenge began: To climb up from the hut to the summit of the Herzogstand, to the full 1731 meters height. To my dismay, it was still foggy out there and nobody was really looking forward to the steep climb through fog and snow up onto the summit – without any vista value, it would have been a photo-less exercise only (with a 10 kg backpack, of course).

We started out and began the switchback trail, and I am sure in summer this would have been an easy walk, but with the snow the trail had become quite narrow, and walking right next to the steep slopes through snow and ice was a new thing for me and required quite some focus and attention.

About 100 meters below the summit, suddenly the sky turned from white to blueish white, and a quick glance at the horizon (stopping first – mind your step) confirmed: We were climbing out of the fog! The first mountain peaks were visible at a distance, with some separation from the background. Now this could turn out to be a photographer’s dream…

With renewed vigor, we made the final two switchbacks and found that we had climbed “just” above the fog ceiling – an incredible view! I was basically too stunned by what I saw to be able to think about “framing it”, and as Bruno, our guide, assured us at the evening’s image critique, this was an “unphotographable moment”.

After having recovered from the first joyful shock, I tried anyway.

above_the_fog

You have to imagine being up there, over the clouds, with an incredible peaceful silence (and actually no wind at all). The snow and mountains showered by sun light, and the clouds (I prefer clouds over fog here…) constantly changing shape and sometimes flowing over the top of the mountain including the summit cross and a group of photogs :-)

summit_cross

The challenge that the motif presented – it was concretely the huge Karwendel mountain range in Austria as well as the Wetterstein mountains on the German side of the border – was the sheer impossible aspect ratio. The mountains spanned a large section of the horizon, but of course being quite distant – I measured 18 km using Google Earth – came out much smaller in the image than the eye made me believe. Three solutions came into my mind:

  1. Just grab a nice looking section from the mountain range and try to have a nice left and right edge composition anyway. With a zoom, you have a large freedom to choose. This was pretty hard, and I am not really satisfied with this image (which was taken using my Sigma 100-300 f/4 at 125 mm).
    karwendel
  2. Look for a mountain that is not connected to the main range. I found one right behind me – the Benediktenwand, which made quite a sight being an island in the sea of clouds. Now, the wikipedia article (sorry, German and French only for now) states that the Benediktenwand was one of the mountains in the last ice age which was high enough to have it’s peak rise about 600 meters out over the glaciers surrounding it. Wonder how this would have looked like!
    benediktenwand
  3. Ha! Make a panorama image! This leaves the aspect ratio problem to the viewer, not the photographer. Worked out only so so, as I needed 11 (!) images at 100 mm focal length to cover the Karwendel only, leaving out the Wetterstein part. Now, if we assume a panorama can nicely be viewed when it has a 1:3 to maximum 1:4 aspect ratio, this is a failure ;-) Here is a quick and dirty preview of the image material – I used Autostitch for this one, when I would go full quality I’d use Photoshop CS3 nowadays.
    quick_panorama
  4. Introduce some foreground trying to convey the scale of the experience – this is the approach that worked best for me, even if the mountains themselves loose their dominance in the resulting images.
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We were discussing with our guide Bruno whether everybody felt comfortable staying up there to watch and photograph the sun coming down, and walk back down in darkness (and fog) – I had packed my flash lights including my new head mounted flash light, and was ready to stay up there to not miss the surely spectacular colors of a sunset. But luck had already shown it’s nicer face to us, and started looking away – the fog rose about another 100 meters, leaving us without any sunlight or motif. So at 4:30pm we decided to give up (the sun was to set at 5:11pm according to my GPS unit) and have the easier walk in remaining day light. It was the right decision, as even those who were willing to wait another 45 minutes and walk in the dark came down without any view of a sunset.

Having missed the opportunity for nice sunset pictures, our hope for a nice sunrise at 7:44am the next day was stifled by our hosts, who with their experience predicted that we would be having fog as well the next morning, and we could “stay in bed until breakfast”.

Well, I didn’t, and got up at 7am to take my gear outside and try my luck :-)

More to come…

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4
Feb 09

Workshop report: Winter Magic (part I)

Last October I got all excited when I managed to get a seat in the Winter Magic workshop organized by the Zoom-In photo institute from Bad Tölz, about 50 km south of Munich. What got me excited was the fact that I had tried to register before without success as those courses are really sought after, and that it was to be led by Bruno Frangi, a nature and landscape photographer I had not met before but whose art had not failed to impress me – just visit his website and see for yourself!

Now, the plan was to take the gondola lift up to the Herzogstand close to the beautiful Walchensee lake, and do some serious landscape photography up there, at an altitude of about 1600 meters. The best news, as usual in the Alps, is that there is a cozy mountain-hut-like hotel where we were to stay overnight. The possibility to sleep up there meant that we would get a chance for a sunset and a sunrise on top of the mountain. Wow!

So much for the plan, which was to be executed last weekend, January 31. When I arrived at the parking lot of the gondola lift Saturday morning, 8:30 am (yikes, again got up before 7 am. Maybe I’ll turn into a real nature photographer someday), I was still positively looking forward to go up as the lake itself (and basically the entire way from Munich) was in fog. Not the really thick can’t see where I’m driving kind, but good enough to dim the lights and kill all shadows. Now, I still hoped for sunshine up there, as I had seen in the news the day before that the sun was shining brightly for the skiing competition in near Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

My hope was shattered when the joyful gondola operator ensured me that there was “only clouds” up there and that this wouldn’t change for the day or the next day. He seemed to enjoy imagining this bunch of photographers sitting on top of his mountain with nothing else to photograph than white snow in white fog.

How wrong I was. And surprised. Surprised by the fact that our workshop leader, Bruno, was getting all fidgety about the possibility to have frost up there, and he insisted that the group moved quickly, and brought the equipment into the gondola to go up and not “miss it”! Miss fog? Sorry? It was already all dull and dark down here, how can that be better? It will only be colder, I thought.

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So I learned about the beauty of hoar frost, and the unlikeliness to encounter it when you try to plan it. We were really lucky to get a full morning of frost photography, see for yourself if that is boring!? But it came even better, stay tuned…

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Landscapes — No Comments
19
Jan 09

Image selection for alpine moods

You might have wondered by now why I didn’t comment further on my new printer – mostly, because I have not yet spent as much time with it as I wanted to. But as indicated earlier I had already one very productive and satisfying weekend with it.

What was the mission? To select a set of images suited to be hung in a one-room condo right in the alps. Now, there is not excessive wall space available, but still, as my largest print size was restricted by my printer to about 48 cm x 32 cm, I figured I could do something worthwhile.

Looking at the placement and type of furniture in the room, I quickly decided that I would need 6 prints. Three large ones, framed nicely, for each of the three walls (in a decidedly non-symmetric hanging!), and three small ones, maybe only A4 size, that are suited to be viewed at close range for the nice Alpine corner bench at the table.

Here is the result of my selection.

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  1. The first image features a traditional (but actually quite new) chapel. This place is in the Zahmer Kaiser mountain range in Austria close to the city of Kufstein at about 1200m altitude.
  2. The second image, and I am really fond of this one as it easily sends my imagination drifting into medieval times, is near the castle of Hochenaschau, in the Bavarian region of Chiemgau.
  3. The third one you know already from my blog’s introductory posts :-)
  4. The next one was taken on the same day and time as the chapel, from a vantage point about 10 meters into the opposite direction of the chapel. It shows the view of the Kaiser Valley with the Wilder Kaiser mountain range as backdrop.
  5. Part of the German Nationalpark Berchtesgaden is the Klausbachtal, a long narrow valley winding up to a pass into Austria. Conveniently, you can take a bus up there and walk down which is what we did last fall. Image number five shows a view of the Reiteralp mountain range.
  6. Back into Austria, here in Winter, I took this image in the wonderful region south of the Dachstein mountains near Ramsau.

The first three images, showing man-made structures somehow embedded in the scenery, were the ones I selected for the small image size and closer viewing, while the more scenic landscape images were printed in the large size.

For the first time, I also bought frames and high quality photo-mounts, and frames all six pictures myself. Phew! One weekend work, but I am absolutely positive about the result!

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28
Oct 08

Posting from Bavaria

Oh, before I forget – I am posting this blog from the German state of Bavaria. This lends itself to many immediate mental associations, and on a beautiful Sunday last June, when I started thinking about doing this blog and reserved the domain, I did take a picture of one very very Bavarian place. And yes, this is how it really looks like here.

_dsc7944

The monastery itself is well known to locals and tourists alike, though they usually get much closer than this – they are famous for their own brew! It is located in the vicinity of the Ammersee lake, close to Munich. Find their website here: http://www.andechs.de/

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