After showing Mustafa (a friend of mine at work) my fireworks photos taken at the “Seenachtsfest” in Lachen (our neighbour village),

he revealed to me that he had signed up for a “Night-Photography” photo work-shop in the city of Zurich. So I decided to join him and also convinced Markus my other photo enthusiast friend from work to sign up as well.

Equipped with tripod, remote release, and different lenses we met at the Zurich main station with all the other participants for the first of the two evenings of this photo-workshop.

Dominik our teacher gave us some short introduction what he had in mind for the evening. Get some nice stripes of car lights, trams passing by and as a “finale” down at the river Limmat a golden Christmas-postcard picture shot. As I was more or less familiar with the theory of how to take such pictures, it was now time to go out and find some nice spots and start taking pictures.

15 meters outside of the Zurich main station we already found our first photo spot with the fountain in front of the main entrance.

A lot of people are passing by and are curious why are all these photographers hanging around here? “Is there a famous celebrity showing up soon?” I was asked more than once.

We worked our way up the Bahnhofstrasse where we took pictures from passing trams. I had to play with the exposure time to figure out what worked best to get nice stripes. If the motive was close a shutter speed between 1-5sec worked well. If the motive was further away a longer shutter speed 5-20sec was preferable. I also managed to get some nice star like shapes from the street lamps by using an aperture of 11 or bigger.

Down at the river Limmat we could use the reflections on the water as an additional creative element to pimp up our photo motive. So we created this nice Christmas postcard like view with the Münster bridge surrounded by the two most famous churches in Zurich. Grossmünster on the left side and Fraumünster on the right side.

 

 

The second evening started at Hardbrücke train station where we spent most of our time around Prime-Tower, Schiffbau, Turbinenplatz and it ended on the rooftop of the Pfingstweid car park.

The Prime-Tower made a very nice motive especially with the street and street lamps in front. I played with the white-balance settings quite a bit and figured out that for me, the pictures looked best in rather cool (blueish) colour temperature (2000 – 3000 kelvin). This was even more visible in post-processing with Lightroom-5.

The shot I like most is when we stood at the Viadukt-footway and the train was passing the chimney of the waste-incineration plant. These are the settings I used for this shot: ISO 100 / 16mm / f4,5 / 8sec. For sure some post-processing was necessary as always when shooting in RAW.

Taking pictures under the “Hardbrücke” was also special. The bridge which is lit underneath, itself makes a great motive. It is even better when you can use the street markings, the tram rails as lead-in lines as well as the cars with their lights when passing by.

The famous Shiffbau building as well as the close by fancy illuminated Turbinenplatz made perfect picture themes.

The last shot of the evening I took from the Pfingstweid car-park rooftop, where you can see the different layers of street which are also differently illuminated which makes the layering even more visible.

Over all it was great fun taking pictures in the middle of the city and I was really happy with the result. Dominik was a very good tour-guide which brought us to very cool spots for taking pictures at night in the city of Zurich. I‘m sure there a lot more nice places which only want to be explored on an other occasion.

 

The camera kit I used for this workshop: Canon 5D Mark III, EF-24-70mm/f4 & EF-16-35mm/f2.8, Phottix PLATO wireless remote release, Triopo GT-2804X8C tripot + B-2 II ballhead, Tamrac Expedition 6x rucksack, LED-Lenser Headlamp