PILATUS :

Photo workshop with NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC photographers:

Florian & Salomon Schulz

We know this guy, went to a multi media show he did on his travels to the Arctic last year, and we’re definitely hooked !

We visited an afternoon workshop last year, and as we saw this chance…we took it. Two days on the Pilatus, a 2132m/7000 ft high mountain in central Switzerland, learning from the pro’s and the best thing is, we are going to do night shoots and learn to do time lapse, Juergs favourites !

So we left home a little early, hoping to take some photos before it got too crowded. An hour’s drive got us to Alpnachstad. The exit is well posted and the parking lot was easily found and half empty, good for us ! All right maybe this was because the weather was getting from average to rather lousy…. We got our tickets for the cogwheel railway. It goes up all 30 minutes, and we had of course just missed it, so we had plenty of time for a coffee before we could at last get up there.

The trip up was exiting, great and ever changing views along the 4618m long ascent ! This is the steepest cogwheel railway in the world , a 48% angle ! It was built in 1889, the guy that built it, or back then even proposed to build it, was officially considered nuts, but he did it, and it is still there and running. It now even is a major tourist attraction in the region, very well liked by the far eastern visitors (judging by the numbers) even on this not so brilliant day.

We started the workshop with 3 hours of theory, some basics then on to night shots and time lapse. Florian and his “little brother” Salomon split up so each group had about 20 persons. Time lapse, for those who do not know it, is taking a photo every 2-5 or 10 seconds, over a prolonged time. Later you add them together to a short 10-15 second movie in which a scene is showed much faster than in real life. Most of you will have seen something like it in a documentary, which shows how a little green plant grows, buds and opens up to become a flower, or the birth of an animal, things which normally take time. It is also very spectacular with landscapes and moving clouds. But it takes a hell of a time if you are the photographer. Imagine you need 25 photos for 1 second of film ! If we do some maths….25 shots x5 seconds apart = 125 seconds x10 = 1250 seconds or 20 minutes for 10 seconds of film. Not too bad you might say. Well yes and no, during daytime it may be okay, but at night with shutter speeds of lets say 20  seconds( instead of 1/100 second) x5 seconds apart, that will take you 5x times longer, meaning we are going to spend approximately 2 hours at 2132m in the middle of the night by temperatures around 0°C, and that just for one 10 second film, and we will certainly have to try at least 2 or 3 !!!

Things turned out somewhat different. We ended the theory part with sensational time lapse movies from last years workshop, openend the windows and saw ….NOTHING ! The weather was so incredibly  bad, we had clouds and fog and the sight was down to about 20m, it had started to rain and because of the cold snow was slowly setting in. No chance of doing anything. Well, at least we are experts in the theory part now. We decided to head for the bar and get drunk instead, damned weather.

Check out the Hotel Pilatus Kulm webpage here

After drinks at the bar we checked in to our rooms at the Hotel Pilatus Kulm, a grand mansion, built in 1890 and recently renovated. The room in modern alpine style was really nice, the bathroom big and modern. The view would have been sensational….  Dinner in the Queen Victoria restaurant was fine. After dinner we had a private movie showing for our group of photographers: Florian and Salomons latest trip, on a sailing boat in Alaska, to photograph bears, that was so cool. In the night it stormed and snowed, I mean snow from left to right, not just a little snow and a little wind ! So our sunrise time lapse went down the drain as well.

In the morning we had about 30cm of fresh snow which, with the tiny bit of light that appeared, did give us the opportunity to do a few snow shots. Breakfast was really good and fit and strengthened we all went for a next theory session. We now went to Florian, the others to Salomon. More repetitions on apertures and shutter speeds, exposure compensations and ISO, the more you do it, the more you use it, the easier and more logical it gets.

Good for us, as we came out the sun was shining and the white powdered landscape did give us some nice photo motives before we headed down the mountain again. Thank you to Florian and Salomon, and if you guys really do a sailing trip to Spitsbergen…I think we are interested !

See the webpage for Florian Schulz here

The best of the rest, in spite of the lousy weather, in this little gallery. Click on the first photo to start the slide show and continue with the > signs to the right.

Text by Astrid Bluemel, photos by Astrid & Juerg Bluemel