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.
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 
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:
- 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).
- 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!
- 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.
- 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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