New moon is upon us once more and I was itching to get out and test not only my E-M1 Mk III that I bought after the but also Move Shoot Move star tracker that would let me break the 25 s exposure limit that I was experiencing with my present set up.
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| Mittenwald and the Karwendel || 6-shot panorama, Olympus 8 mm, f/5.6, 1/500 s, ISO 200 |
It's been a while since I was this keyed up for a trip of any sort and by Friday evening I must have had packed and unpacked my gear around 4 times already. Saturday morning and my rucksack was feeling suspiciously light. Huh? Oh yes, the all important camera gear bag. Phew.
It had been a couple of weeks since we'd had a leg-stretch and so Sharon and I set off for Garmisch after a comfortable breakfast on Saturday morning to hike up to the Hausberg. It had been raining on and off for the previous few days in Kaltenberg, but in the mountains it had been snowing. In the first light of sun, the tops were shining pristine and I was really excited about the night to come and the images we would hopefully be able to make. After last year's successes in the Allgäu I have absolutely fallen in love with taking photos in the mountains in early summer as the sun goes down. The snow fields radiate in the late evening light both before and after the sun goes down and I was trigger happy after a few weeks out of the field.
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| Wetterstein || Olympus 100 mm, f/8, 1/640 s, ISO 200 |
The hike up the Hausberg afforded us occasional glimpses of the surrounding snow peaks but no real photo opportunities beyond the occasional spring flowers and a friendly
squorrel. The saving grace of the tour was Weißbier and Wurst at the kiosk at the Bayernhaus. It's been too long!
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| Alpspitz through the Trees || Olympus 57 mm, f/8, 1/500 s, ISO 200 |
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| Forest Foliage || Olympus 100 mm, f/8, 1/640 s, ISO 200 |
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| Friendly Squorrel || Olympus 100 mm, f/5.6, 1/160 s, ISO 200 |
We were at the Mittenwald car park 10 min after Matthias arrived - not bad considering the different journeys we'd had. Sharon then returned home complete with my woolly hat and thermos flask of hot tea (entirely my fault) whilst Matthias and I headed up the Kranzberg via the delightfully situated Korbinian Hütte. Although my shoulders were aching like heck at this point due to all the photographic gear and warm clothing I was carrying in my ancient Deuter rucksack, our spirits were still high at this stage as the clear skies looked set to last.
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| Korbinian Hütte and Karwendel Spitze || Olympus 20 mm, f/5.6, 1/800 s, ISO 200 |
Unfortunately this wasn't the case and we arrived at the summit only to find clouds rolling in from the west. Although this might be fun for the sunset, it was not what we were looking for for the night. We used the time to set up the tripods and snap a few evening shots as well as taking a blue hour panorama of Mittenwald and the Karwendel that would later serve as foreground for the starry landscapes. We waited for the lights in the town to come out for this; a darkened-down shot of a light-less town would not look right and if we left it too late then the difference between the bright lights and the dark mountains would have been too much, plus the exposure would take several minutes at low ISO, time that we'd rather invest in the sky. The combination of sky and ground has to look natural for the photo to work.
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| Blue-Hour over Mittenwald || 6-shot panorama, Olympus 8 mm, f/8, 2 s, ISO 200 |
Now it was just a question of waiting for the clouds to go and the stars to come out. Olympus cameras have a built-in intervalometer and can automatically generate time-lapse videos from the shots. Here's my offering from the evening's shenanigans. I'd hoped to catch one of the Milky Way rising over the mountains as well, but failed in that undertaking.
There were plenty of vistas to occupy us while we waited; the Kranzberg boasts a 360° view of the Karwendel and Wetterstein mountains and we must have been able to see at least 50 or more summits of the surrounding mountains. We left the tripods where they were; they were important markers for taking the later shots, and one was recording a time lapse. There was enough light left not to need them with the Olympus cameras anyway. What they lack in noise levels when you jack the ISO up they make up for in spades with out-of-this-world image stabilisation.
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| Solitary Pine || Olympus 86 mm, f/5.6, 1/200 s, ISO 200 |
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| Skeletal Birch || Olympus 80 mm, f/5.6, 1/6 s, ISO 200 |
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| Kranzberg Gipfelhaus || Olympus 15 mm, f/5.6, 1/1000 s, ISO 200 |
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| Austrian Karwendel || Olympus 50 mm, f/5.6, 1/250 s, ISO 200 |
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| Wettersteinspitze || Olympus 20 mm, f/5.6, 1/100 s, ISO 200 |
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| Sunset Silhouette || Olympus 100 mm, f/5.6, 1/400 s, ISO 400 |
Unfortunately the clouds were teasingly reluctant. Although we could see a clear horizon to the west where the prevailing wind was coming from, the more it blew the more clouds seemed to appear. And Mittenwald is
bright at night. Around midnight we began to see more and more stars appearing overhead, but the wind was increasing, the temperature decreasing and there were still bands of cloud over Munich, Mittenwald and Innsbruck that were robbing us of the darkness that you need for really good pictures of the Milky Way. I'd had high hopes of some cool blue-hour photos of the first stars over the Karwendel mountain range. They didn't manifest either.
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| Best of a Poor Sky || 2x6-Shot panorama, Olympus 8 mm, f/8/2.8, 1/640/25 s, ISO 200/3200 |
In the end I gave up around 12:30, giving it up as a bad job and retreating to the log cabin on top of the Kranzberg to shiver the night away on a hard wooden bench. Matthias stuck it out in the wind-shadow of the cabin and actually got a half-way decent shot of the arch of the Milky Way over the mountains during a 10 minute interval in the clouds, the composition that I'd been after. But even then, the galactic core wasn't popping the way it can sometimes and so I didn't berate myself for not having stuck it out. I was missing a vital bit of kit for getting a solid panorama anyway and I just wasn't feeling it after my hike during the day as well.
My sleep was interrupted around 4:00 am by a couple of revellers from the valley, who for some bizarre reason decided that the top of the Kranzberg was the ideal place to smoke some whacky baccy and sing badly to German rap blaring out of a ghetto blaster. They blinded Matthias' acquired night vision with a blast from their torch and generally annoyed us for 15-30 min before deciding that shorts and a hoody were insufficient protection from the elements and buggered off whence they had come. Good riddance.
We were up at 5:00 to catch a glimpse of first light. Of course all the interesting clouds had gone by this stage and all we were left with was that typical narrow but intense band of colour low on the horizon as the sun made its welcome face known.
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| Mountain Dawn || 3-Shot HDR Olympus 8 mm, f/5.6, 1/10 s, ISO 200 |
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| Pretty in Pink || Olympus 18 mm, f/5.6, 1/15 s, ISO 200 |
Matthias had one surprise composition left before we headed down to the car and home, an alpine meadow complete with wooden hay barn in front of the Wettersteinspitze. Another tricky exposure that I've had to exposure blend to make the barn visible against the bright snowy mountain.
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| Alm Landscape Underneath the Wetterstein || Exposure Blend Olympus 18 mm, f/8, 1/50 s, ISO 200 |
90 minutes later, after having been standing in the same clothes for 24 h we were back home in blazing sunshine.
So was it worth it given the disappointing astro' conditions? Every trip like this I learn something. I don't always come away with the shots that I wanted. Sometimes (often) I come away with bonus images that I hadn't expected or even contemplated. So yes, I'm a better - or at least more experienced - photographer than I was this time last week and next time I'll be in a better position to get that shot.
