Twenty-Four Hours in the Mountains

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.

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.

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! 

Alpspitz through the Trees || Olympus 57 mm, f/8, 1/500 s, ISO 200

Forest Foliage || Olympus 100 mm, f/8, 1/640 s, ISO 200

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.

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.

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. 

Video ©️ Mike Page and Rhage Designs

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.

Solitary Pine || Olympus 86 mm, f/5.6, 1/200 s, ISO 200

Skeletal Birch || Olympus 80 mm, f/5.6, 1/6 s, ISO 200

Kranzberg Gipfelhaus || Olympus 15 mm, f/5.6, 1/1000 s, ISO 200

Austrian Karwendel || Olympus 50 mm, f/5.6, 1/250 s, ISO 200

Wettersteinspitze || Olympus 20 mm, f/5.6, 1/100 s, ISO 200

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.

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.

Mountain Dawn || 3-Shot HDR Olympus 8 mm, f/5.6, 1/10 s, ISO 200

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.

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.

In Seach of the Milky Way - From Dusk 'Til Dawn in the Allgäu

At the end of May I scouted a possible location for an astro shoot in the Allgäu mountains come next new moon. A good milky way photos lives and dies by the foreground and I wanted somewhere with a good view over the alps. The middle of June arrived and the forecast for Friday and Saturday was awful; clouds, rain, the lot. Nothing doing. The next weather window was going to be Tuesday night. To make matters worse, the initiator of the whole idea - my friend Matthias - couldn't make it as he was stuck up at work in northern Bavaria. But an old school friend who happens to live in Munich was interested enough to bite when I announced my intentions on Facebook and so Martin and I ended up heading down to Fischen im Allgäu early Tuesday evening to see what we could see. Meteorologically we were on a rising tide - there were still some clouds around but the weather was definitely clearing from the north and so we were optimistic.

The Shoot

Waiting For The Moon To Set || Huawei P30 Pro

Dusk

Driving down there were still cloud remnants lurking in all the wrong places, but the northerly wind was driving them deeper into the alps and so we weren't too concerned. We set off from the car-park in the early evening light. Normally, like most people, I spend most of my time in the mountains during the day. Unless I'm staying in one of the mountain huts, I'm generally back down in the valley for dinner. This evening's experience may get me to revisit that schedule. There's a good reason why landscape photographers choose to shoot at the ends of the day; the light quality is very different. It's softer, gentler and less blue. Watching the pastel colours changing on the Vorarlberg mountains in the gathering dusk made me start rethinking how I plan my days in the Alps.

As the Sun Goes Down || Olympus f/7.1, 1/80 s, ISO 200

It was great to see that not all of the snow had disappeared in the intervening weeks; I find the last snowfields really make a photo like this and I don't shy back from exaggerating them in post-processing like  here (above).

The Pastel Colours of Evening || Olympus f/7.1, 1/160 s, ISO 200

All the Layers || Olympus f/7.1, 1/30 s, ISO 200

Moonset

I'd promised my school chum a relatively easy hike up to the first mountain top that I'd identified. Unfortunately we didn't make it all the way and ended up about 100 m below the summit on a slight shoulder. The location was optimal for the first spectacle of the evening - the fresh new moon was due to set behind the peak above us and our location appeared to be optimal for that. My smartphone app (Sky View) was showing me where the moon should be in the sky, but for the life of me I couldn't find it. I was beginning to fret that either (a) the app was playing up, or (b) there wasn't going to be enough moon to see. As the sky darkened and I still couldn't see it Martin spotted it - why we hadn't seen it before was a complete mystery as it was so clear at this point.

Well It's Obvious Now! || Olympus f/8, 1/5 s, ISO 200

Setting Moon || Olympus 100 mm f/5.6, 0.6 s, ISO 400

Before we turned our attention to the stars that were beginning to appear in twos and threes there was one more dusk photo to grab before the technical stuff began:

When Purple Comes Out To Play || Olympus f/5.6, 40 s, ISO 200

As fun as it was to shoot the setting moon, it cost me my first milky way shots as I wasn't set up to get a good foreground photo during the blue hour that I could use to blend into the final image in post. The shot I ended up getting was ok, probably one of my better photos of the Milky Way per se, but the foreground is lacklustre. I don't know whether it would have been any better 100 m higher up either, but the lesson is that you need to be in position early, you need to get your foreground shots in in good time and you can only recon on about two good astro shots per night, one after the sun goes down and one before it rises, unless you're shooting with multiple cameras.

Collision Imminent || Olympus 300 mm f/5.6, 0.6 s, ISO 1600, Composite Image

Milky Way

The challenge with astrophography is the low light levels. You need an open aperture and relatively high ISO with a wide angle lens to get enough light to the sensor before the earth's rotation turns the star points into lines - the so-called star trails. As a rule of thumb, the maximum exposure time before this happens is 500/focal length* (400 if you're being conservative). So for my 16 mm equivalent wide angle lens, I can shoot for 25 s. In order to further increase light-sensitivity, we need to increase the ISO. Small sensor cameras (I shoot with an Olympus micro four-thirds crop sensor, technically a small sensor camera) are notorious for being sensitive to high ISO, the images tend to have a lot of unsightly noise - a random phenomenon that causes an unsightly buzz in the image. But being random, there's a solution: If you take multiple shots and then take the average of those shots, the noise is diminished. The challenge is that the software performing the calculations needs to take into account the fact that the stars are moving - if it didn't you'd end up with the trails again. All in all quite a technical feat, especially when there's a foreground involved. Fortunately the free Windows software Sequator can do all of this - it's what it was written for. It's not the most user-friendly app, but if you know what you're doing (or in my case if you know someone who knows what they're doing), it's extremely powerful. The trick seems to be not using too many of the features, but more of that below.

*25 mm equivalent, so with my micro four-thirds sensor I need to double my focal length

First Starlight - Stacked but Unprocessed || Olympus 8 mm, f/2.8, 25 s, ISO 6400, Stacked

We could just about make out the trail of the Milky Way in the Allgäu sky. From our vantage point I tried several series of shots, with and without my Haida Clear Light filter and Tiffen Fog filter and with the new 7Artisans 7.5 mm fish-eye. In the end I liked the unfiltered images through the Panasonic Leica 8-18 mm the best. The above image is stacked to reduce noise but otherwise unprocessed. The sheer clarity of the image just blows me away. The detail in the Milky Way is amazing. But I don't think this is a good Milky Way photo. It's a good photo of the Milky Way, but like I said earlier, a good Milky Way photo stands or falls by the foreground and I wasn't satisfied with what I was getting here, so after a cup of tea  and a pasty (thanks Martin, those were life-savers) I lay down for a 45 min shut-eye before heading up to the ridge, where I knew just the spot.

With Haido Clear Sky Filter, Unprocessed

7Artisans 7.5 mm Fish-eye Lens, Unprocessed

One of the greatest challenges with astro photography is finding infinity on the focus dial. Looking through the viewfinder you're confronted with an almost completely black image - finding something to focus on can be extremely difficult. If there's a bright light a couple of miles off this works relatively well, as at this distance there's effectively no focal change between 2 miles and infinity. It was quite a challenge in the dark though, and I had to hunt through the magnified viewfinder on the Olympus to locate Jupiter (bright spot in the middle of the images above) and twiddle the focus ring of the lens to render the tiny fuzzy light as tight and small as possible. Then it's shoot and hope. You can examine the images on the camera display, but you're never entirely sure whether your photo is sharp or not until you get the image on the computer screen.

Despite being pitch dark, it was easy enough to find my way by the light of my head-torch, having scouted the area less than a month before. I located the second spot relatively easily and set up the tripod again. A few ultra-high-ISO shots helped me frame the photo correctly. I also tried some low ISO long exposures with a bit of light painting so that I would have a foreground to go with it. This is a separate image that is blended with the processed astro image in post processing (see last image). This final photo here has to be my favourite image of the year so far. I didn't get a huge number of finished shots that I was happy with, but at the end of the day, if you come away with at least one, that's a win.

Milky Way Over The Allgäu || Olympus 8 mm, f/2.8, 25 s ISO 6400, Stacked

I carried on shooting for a while after this into the blue light of pre-dawn before giving up and catching a few more minutes sleep lent against my rucksack. It was a mild night with little wind and the ground was comfortable and dry beneath me, not a sound to be heard.

Birdsong and a yipping fox in the valley below alerted me to the coming dawn. By the light of the red band of cloud to the east I could just make out a small peat pond nearby that I'd just avoided in the dark. In retrospect I should have taken a lower vantage point for this shot. This is two images blended in ON1 Photo Raw, one for the sky, one for the foreground. I took the liberty of brightening the tufts of cotton grass to emphasise them in the pre-dawn light.

Mountain Tarn at Dawn || Olympus f/5.6, 1/6 s, ISO 200

Then it was down to find Martin and head down to the car. I found him warming himself over his camping stove and ready to return to the valley. As I waited for him to pack his things there was time for one last shot of the sun rising on the mountain escarpment opposite us. 

The Red Light Of Dawn || Olympus f/5.6, 1/30 s, ISO 200

Processing the Images

If you're not interested in the nitty-gritty of processing astro photography you can probably stop reading here and scan to the last images. It's very easy to over-process Milky Way photos: I spent two evenings working on this last shot only to have Sharon (correctly) tell me that it was too speckled and she didn't like the foreground. I've left this technical bit to the end for my techie friends who'll be interested in this stuff (hi Matthias!). 

Before the images can be 'stacked' (averaged), they need to be in tiff format. ON1 Photo Raw, my post-processing software can export tiffs, but they're the wrong format for my stacking software, Sequator. The images have to be opened in Olympus Workspace and exported as tiffs from there. For each image I used 10 star images and two control images with the lens cap on (lights and darks respectively).

Crop of main image

Unprocessed image OOC	Stacked in Sequator 10 Star images, 2 Noise images (with lens cap on), Align stars, Freeze ground, Sky region: Partial, otherwise all default settings	Processed in ON1 Photo Raw 2020 Develop: Contrast +24, Highlights +18, Midtones +15, Shadows -20, Whites +45, Temperature +40, Tint -3 Effects: Sharpening, Noise Reduction (Moderate), Tone Enhancer (Shadows Lighter on foreground; Midtone Contrast Boost, 50%), LUTs (1983, 35%), Sunshine (Sunglow, 50%), Curves (mild S-curve), Dynamic contrast on Milky Way

I also tried a blend of my favourite image with the light-painted foreground in ON1 Photo Raw. It's not perfect as I seem to have adjusted the camera between frames and had to stretch the resulting images to fit. I'd be interested to hear which image you prefer, this one with more detail in the foreground trees, or the original "Milky Way Over The Allgäu" above. My jury is still out on this one.

Milky Way Over The Allgäu II || Olympus 8 mm, f/2.8, 25 s ISO 6400, Stacked and Blended

Chasing the Light: Where Matthias and I Spur One Another On

Some time last autumn, I spotted a photo of one of my local sites (not really a surprise, I live about 15 min from one of Bavaria's most photographed lakes) in one of the Olympus User FB groups and I got to chatting with the photographer, a young German guy living up near the Czech border. We seemed to have quite a bit in common in terms of the style of photography we were interested in and so I suggested that we should get together for an afternoon if he was ever in the neighbourhood.

Mill Race at the Pöllat Gorge || f5.6, 1/2 s, ISO 64

Towards the end of September he was travelling back home through Munich and so we arranged to meet up for an afternoon photoshoot at the Ammersee, a local lake with a few great spots for late light photos. We had a great afternoon, chatting about favourite YouTube photographers and filling in gaps in the other's education as we hiked up to Kloster Andechs, taking the occasional snap in the autumn woodland.

Autumn at the Ammersee || f8, 1/800 s, ISO 200

I left Matthias to shoot the sunset at the lake alone with the promise that I'd be in touch later in the autumn to show him a couple of my favourite local spots, the Pöllat Gorge at Füssen and the Stuiben Falls just round the corner in Reutte.

Now I'm not a great fan of my own company and so when Sharon planned a weekend visit to our kids who are both studying in the UK it seemed like a golden opportunity. I'm not usually one for sunrise shots, but somehow Matthias pursuaded me that it would be cool to catch the sun coming up down at lake Hopfensee, so we were out of the house by 5.30 on Saturday morning, chasing the light down to Füssen.

Hopfensee Google Maps

QUICK SUMMARY

Best Conditions	sunrise or sunset, pretty much any time of the year
Challenges	avoid windy conditions, also, as mentioned below
Parking	all along the promenade (ticket required) or at the far end of Hopfen am See (limited parking)
Where to Stop	any of the cafes or restaurants along the promenade
Links	-

Sunrise at the Hopfensee || f7.1, 1/2000 s, ISO 200

We parked the car at the end of the village whilst still in the blue hour. Normally, the northern shore is lined with jetties poking out into the lake and providing photogenic leading lines into the water and on to the mountains. Apparently, they take the jetties in for the winter, leaving only a couple for us to scrabble over. Not only that but the lake was far from still as were struck with a warm south wind, the dreaded Föhn.

So it was tripods and filters at dawn, playing around with long exposures and bracketing, things that I knew about in theory but little hands on experience with. Even though he's quite a few years younger than me, Matthias is a lot more experienced than me with these technical aspects of photography and it was good to have him on side with tips and advice.

Early Morning Light at the Hopfensee || f9, 1/60 s, ISO 200

With dawn wrapped up we headed back to Füssen to tackle the Pöllat gorge under Neuschwanstein. 

Pöllat Gorge Google Maps

QUICK SUMMARY

Best Conditions	essentially any, can get busy in the summer / carry on to the Marienbrücke with a view out over the castle
Challenges	only open in summer / avoid direct sunlight
Parking	€7 in Schwangau (10 min walk), €1/h at the Tegelberg cable-car (20 min)
Where to Stop	any of the places along the Alpseestrasse, our go-to restaurant has been the Alpenstuben
Links	Pöllatschlucht (German), Schwangau Website (German)

I'm sure there used to be a small car park at the beginning of the Pöllat gorge for hikers (as distinct from the mere tourists flocking to castle Neuschwanstein), but not any more. These days you're funnelled into the €7 mega carparks. From there you have to follow Pöllatweg along the bottom of the hill to get to the beginning of the gorge. Do check whether the gorge is open before you go. Unfortunately this isn't shown on the Pöllatschlucht website, but you can find the information by searching the (German) website for Schwangau, which caught us out. The gorge really is worth a visit, but we got to the gate only to find it closed for the winter.

Closed for the Winter

We were about to give up and head off to our next location, but the bottom of the gorge is always worth spending a few minutes on. First and foremost there's the wooden mill race that leads to the sawmill by the Gippsmühle. I personally find this channel extremely photogenic and always worth building into a composition, either as the main element or a clear leading line. Even as a backdrop, the trestled trough is interesting, partly because it's not completely water-tight and is always dripping. But there's also something very special about the water and rocks here in the eastern Allgäu. Due to the minerals in the ground, the water has a distinct green cast, something that you'll see even more clearly in the photos taken at the Stuiben falls.

Green on Gold || f14, 1 s, ISO 200

Here at the mouth of the Pöllat gorge there was also a pool at the bottom of the last falls. Unfortunately, there were no clean shots to be had from our side of the river, partly due to the mill race. Matthias ended up soaked because he squeezed through under the leaking trestles. I ended up soaked as I had chosen to go the long way round and cross lower down. The rocks were predictably slippery and I ended up on my ass in the water.

One of the things that more experienced photographers always say when you're concentrating on a composition is: "turn round" - don't be so focussed on what's in front of you that you forget your surroundings. I'm so glad that I bore this advice in mind as I was looking for my shots, in the branches above us there was this verdant scene: 

Green on Green || f7.1, 1/50, ISO 1600

There was a particular image I had in mind and was keeping my eye out for; gyrating autumn leaves in a waterfall pool. The beech forest was particularly generous with the leaves at this time of year and I found a suitable pool, but to the naked eye, the leaves were not really moving much. Fortunately we both had our filters and tripods with us (yes, this time even I resorted to a tripod). A 10 s exposure with the Panasonic Leica f2.8 8-18 mm revealed that not only were the leaves gyrating, there was a double-centred flow and I ended up with an image that I was really happy with.

Orange on Green || f14, 1 s, ISO 200

Stuiben Falls Google Maps

QUICK SUMMARY

Best Conditions	all year
Challenges	avoid direct sunlight
Parking	free at the Wanderparkplatz E-Werk
Where to Stop	-
Links	Stuiben Falls hike suggestion

We grabbed a quick lunch in Schwangau before driving round the corner to the Stuiben Falls. I never knew this place existed even though I've lived nearby for over 15 years, but last year I happened on the website of a local photographer who was showcasing some images of the location. Even knowing where they are, it's extremely difficult to find the falls, but utterly worth it. The road to the parking spot feels like you're driving through a factory premises and even when you do find where to leave the car, it's not immediately obvious where the falls are. Once you've been there once it's relatively easy, but finding it the first time is a complete pig. The crazy thing is, once you've found them, you realise they're only 5 min from the road. Talk about easy access!

Upper Falls || f22, 5 s, ISO 64

Whilst not particularly high or spectacular, the falls are an absolute delight to shoot because of the colouring. The rock is light and varies from grey dolomite to golden where it's been in the water and the water is properly emerald green - no tone enhancement necessary! The gorge is deep enough to cut out direct sunlight for most of the day but open enough to catch plenty of light. We started at the upper falls, a short 5 min up the trail, and worked our way down from there.

Middle Falls || f10, 2 s, ISO 200

Middle Falls Detail || f20, 5 s, ISO 200

There are a couple of spots where it's worth crossing the river (provided you can do so safely), so bring wellies or river shoes, depending on the season. Working our way down from the top, we got a handful of solid images. There's a viewing platform for the bottom falls, but you have to be extremely careful shooting from here with a tripod if there are other people around as every footstep shakes the platform. The very best angle means placing the tripod the other side of the fence so it's balanced on the rocks, but make sure it's tethered somehow so you don't lose your gear into the pool below.

The Lower Pools || f16, 5 s, ISO 200

Matthias Making the Ultimate Sacrifice

At the very bottom, it's worth crossing the river again for close ups of the bottom falls, but be aware that you won't be able to catch the main flow from here unless you're prepared to take some crazy steps:

Lower Falls Detail || f20, 5 s, ISO 200

Hopfen am See Revisited

The light looked like it was closing down on us as we finished up at the falls. Not only that but we were tired - we'd been up since the wee hours and shooting all day. The forecast was inconclusive. Should we or shouldn't we swing by the Hopfensee to catch the sunset? We decided that we'd take the detour and keep our options open. The closer we got, the more interesting the sky was looking and whilst we didn't necessarily get the colours we were hoping for, there was definitely some magic in the sky. We piled out of the car with all our gear, eager to set up again at the head of one of the few remaining jetties only to find a photography workshop in residence. Each of the pontoons already had a cluster of eager photographers crowding for the optimal spot. We finally walked far enough that the crowds petered out and found ourselves a little jetty almost to ourselves. Several curious passers by asked what was going on, whether there was a special event that they weren't aware of? After carefully explaining that we were there to see the volcano erruption (oh yes I did!), they mostly scurried off on their evening perambulations, leaving us to shoot in peace.

The Competition Hogging the Jetties

Elusive Jetty || f20, 15 s, ISO 64

My usual photography style is to vaguely plan a day out and take the camera along to spontaneously catch the good views as they come. I think most people are like this because for most of us, our photography started as a way of documenting where we'd been. This day out with Matthias was very different, the first time I'd ever been out where everything was planned around the photography. Having another more experienced photographer to hand was great in terms of learning some new tricks. We also spot different compositions, which is mutually beneficial. The day out stretched me technically and was a great learning experience. I'd definintely recommend going out on a shoot with a fellow photographer as a way of continuing your mastery of the art.

What experience have you had shooting with another photographer? Leave your comments below.