Famous Swiss snow ridge Biancograt leading to Piz Bernina 4’048m called Stairway to Heaven.

Today I’d like to introduce one of the alpinist’s dreams, the famous Bianco Ridge, leading to the summit of Piz Bernina, 4’048m. Having done the rather long hike to the Tschierva hut, glacier crossing in darkness next morning awaits the alpinist. The snow ridge itself is situated between climbing passages in medium+ difficulties. Ascending on one of the purest and still present snow ridges like that is a dream. The snow ridge is approx. 850m long and gains you about 420 meters of altitude up to 3’995m. It doesn’t arrive at the summit, so plenty of climbing lies still ahead. The descend is done via the Spalla Ridge. Due to heavy traffic on its climbing cruxes we had to wait several hours before we summited. Frozen and a little tired, I lost my ice axe on the Spalla Ridge. Without this very useful tool, the descent took us longer than usually, arriving in late evening at the Marco e Rosa hut.

Dent d’Herens – very remote and less oftn accessed swiss 4171m peak in the neighborhood of Matterhorn 4’478m in morning light.

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I did not do much posting this year but I’m sure I can catch up soon. Lots of high alpine images are waiting to be published.

Thanks for those of you who liked this image as I first posted it, and if you didn’t see it yet: I hope you like it!

Last daylight strikes the Moiry Glacier seracs, Les Bouquetins and Grand Cornier

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For those who visited Iceland it’s obvious: The location of this image is the Blue Lagoon / Bláa Lónið. While most tourists head for the Lagoon for a swim, preferably on rainy days, I visited this spot for long exposure photography.

The light blue color of the water is a product of the high concentration of silicic acid. The fact that the bottom of the lake is white colored by the natural chemical debris adds an even lighter appearance.

Of course it was rainy that day, and of course the wind was more than light. These conditions limited creativity a bit. I decided to shoot low angles in order to rise the tripod not too much. As the windy rain went reliably into one direction with only little variation, I was stuck to shoot this single direction to avoid rain drops on my filters. However, I was surprised of the still resulting overall sharpness of the images. Additionally, I made a little experiment: I left VR switched on for one image and turned it off for the next. The VR worked surprisingly well as it compensated the micro movement of the set up caused by the wind.

How was your experience, did you try to shoot a LE with VR turned on (on purpose ;-))?

Hope you like my image!

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Glaciers melt, and the melting water has to go somewhere. It has to make its way from the glacier’s ends to the sea, and as this is a journey without much difference in elevation, the water flow covers broad areas of soft lava rock fields. This results in wide estuaries or alluvial plains which are sometimes hard to pass. Several people wrecked their jeeps by trying to do so.

I was fascinated by the row of equally shaped wave tops of this melting water flow. It contained much mud and gave the waves a unique surface structure. Interesting thing was that these wave tops moved slowly forward during this long exposure, resulting in a different shape than it appeared to the viewer’s eye. The water color was not too appealing (neither the lava soil was), so I decided to go black and white.

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I love my Swiss mountains, but sometimes it’s nice to go somewhere else. The Chamonix region offers a lot, and I know french climbers who do not go anywhere else.

After climbing the Rochefort Ridge a time ago, Daniel Arndt and me decided to climb Dent du Géant. This peak is a giant 4’000 meters needle, as you can see by the shadows down left. Climbing there is sometimes near to vertical, and the way down is really vertical: Abseiling only, sometimes overhanging.

The guy on shown here managed to reach the start of the climb a bit earlier than us, resulting in a 45 minutes waiting for us to enter the climb.

However, it was a great experience to climb this mountain, and the view was magnificent. In the background you can see Aiguille du Midi.

Make sure to check an earlier image of Dent de Géant by fellow photographer QT Luong.

Hope you like my mountain image!

Google+: Reshared 2 times

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Today I start to post the first image of my recent short-trip to Iceland. There are so many great images posted here on G+, I’d like to mention my friend Dominique Dubied as a superb example as well as Tim Vollmer and Joe Azure.

As a high alpine photographer I’m used to shoot with a limited choice of gear, under time pressure and generally rough conditions inherent with high altitude regions. In Iceland, many great spots seemed very accessible to me, some are even reachable within a 50 meters range from the parking ground of your car. This fact inspired me to seek for little gems which are less travelled, “harder” to access and sometimes quite hidden. So I’m not sure if I will present images of the Top 10 spots of this beautiful island ;-).

Let me start with a view down into a rather small and typically yellow-green canyon. What attracted me most were all the details this frame offered. You can see every single stream of the waterfall rushing over the red rock, and every detail of the two lower falls are available. On top, the water flow divides into 2 directions. I’m not sure if this little canyon is very popular, and this is why I loved it.

This image was captured using one Big Stopper at 25 seconds exposure time. The wind was medium but made LE life a bit hard

I hope you enjoy this rather unusual image of my portfolio!

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Mountain photographers know that “good climbing weather” often is the opposite of “good photography weather”. No clouds, just blue sky. Well, there are several possibilities to make the best use of such a “good climbing weather” image. While post-processing, it was instantly obvious that color wouldn’t do here – but there are lots of different tones available, which add well to the silhouette style of this capture. I like this image because of the depth, it’s near-far-relationship.

This shot was made 10 minutes before reaching the summit of Rimpfischhorn, 4’199m. The backgroud features the highest mountain massif of Switzerland, the Monte Rosa group (left side). At the right edge, the Matterhorn is included. The climbing guy is Mr. Daniel Arndt, acting once more as the human subject in one of my images. This image might be special as well to my friend Dalibor Pačić who created many images of Rimpfischhorn already last summer.

I also updated my list of curators (thanks for your constant efforts), so I really hope that i don’t bother any ex-curators again ;-).

Thanks for reading, I hope you like my image!

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Thank you +Jarek Klimek, I’m happy to be mentioned in a great company of
+Bernd Schaefers
+Scott Detweiler
+Josh Adamski
my friend +Viktor Peschel
+Thierry DECKER
my friend +Christof Teuscher
+Justin Mier

Have a nice weekend!

Reshared post from +Jarek Klimek

8 TOP Google+ Photographs for July 3
http://www.photoextract.com/plus-extract/2013/7/3

Cover photo was created by +Wilfried Haferland.  
His website: http://haferlandphotography.com

#PlusPhotoExtract

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This image was selected as one of the 8 TOP Google+ Photographs for July 3 by PhotoExtract.com. Thank you Jarek!

It’s been a while since my last post, more than 4 weeks already. Time to catch up. As most of you noticed, the spring weather in central europe was a bit difficult. The result for me was much less outdoor-activities high up in the mountains. So I’ve selected an image I made a while ago.

Lake Sils (“Lej da Segl” in Romansh language of eastern Switzerland) is a wide lake at approx. 1’800m amsl, near the mountain pass of Maloja. This lake is frozen until mid-June and gets back its ice-cover already in October. We used the remaining time for a very nice LE shooting in the evening, frozen fingers included. The typical “Wind of Maloja”, coming up from Bergell,  blew the clouds nicely over Piz da la Margna and made for an almost volcanic impression.

I really enjoyed this day shooting with Johan Peijnenburg. It’s always fantastic to share knowledge and to learn how to do things better.

Hope you like my image!

Google+: Reshared 15 times

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