AlpenglowJoin me learning Nature Photography

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.

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.

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