Hailey, Varenna and I just returned last weekend from a six-day vacation in Cabarete, a beach town on the north shore of the Dominican Republic. We traveled with Hailey’s mom, Diana, who instigated the trip last April. The logic was like many vacations hatched for this time of the year: some place warm, with sand and surf. No other requirements.

Why Cabarete? Well, we had access to a timeshare there, and it afforded all the things we needed: a two-room suite with views of the Caribbean Sea. Food? Included. Drink? Yep, that too. We were determined to rediscover loafing.

And it was because of this that I had low expectations for photography. It seemed that we wouldn’t stray too far from the resort, and while we had a rental car, we didn’t plan to use it much (on account we had read in Lonely Planet that the roads were treacherous and that the rules of the road were non-existent).

While I had recently bought a new lens — and I was eager to try out (a Canon 24mm-105mm f4) — I was remarkably less-than-obsessed with my usual vacation routine: waking at dawn, shoulder-slung lens bag for quick access, “can I take a photo of you?” memorized in the local language…

We were going for the main purpose of relaxing on a beach. We had few ambitions. Sigh.

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What we did discover was that driving in the D.R. really isn’t that bad. It’s just different.

After the 30-minute drive from Puerto Plata Airport to the Ocean Manor in Cabarete, I was brimming with confidence. String of mopeds going 15mph? Just skirt right by them. Massive dump truck riding your bumper? Just ease to the side and wave him around on the next straightaway. Donkey on the road? Keep an eye on him but keep going. Cattle drive covering the highway? Yield to the ones with horns (if you want your damage deposit back from Avis, that is).

We arrived on Sunday, and by Tuesday we had abandoned the loafing game plan and hit the road — our curiosity piqued by the drive in, the desire to see Playa Grande, and a renewed sense of road-worthiness. It was a sign of things to come, for throughout our six-night stay, we drove to Rio San Juan and Playa Grande (twice), hung out in Sosua (twice) and checked out the beach scene in downtown Cabarete. Without a rental car, we probably would have loafed a lot more, and — I believe — we would have had a lot less fun.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that driving the highway along the Dominican Republic’s North Shore was my favorite part of the trip. The only tough part of driving was staying alert in the urban areas. The roads are maybe a lane and a half wide, so we encountered plenty of tight squeezes paired with sudden motorbike merges.

But without a rental car, I don’t think I would have had any assessment of the country — its rugged landscape, it’s people, everyday life. All of that would have been based on what I’d read while loafing. That just doesn’t feel right to me.

And so, it turns out we’re not very good at loafing.

This was the fourth vacation we’ve gone on with our daughter, Varenna. I guess its not surprising, but I have to make note of the fact that each time we go somewhere with her it just gets better. She is an incredible observer, picking up on the smallest details, the distant sounds, and even nuances you’d expect a 2-year-old to miss, such as the fact that locals use a different language than us. She quickly learned to say “¿Hola, como estas?” as a form of greeting. This delighted every Dominican she came across.

And she learned to overcome some anxieties around water, especially the ocean. Its very rewarding as a father to watch your daughter evolve in a matter of days, from timidity to just-the-right-amount-of-confidence. Of course, this conquering of Wave Terror also happened the day we were leaving, which meant a lot of her clothes were wetter than we wanted in the suitcase — and let me tell you, nothing’s smellier than a toddler’s seawater-addler clothes after 16 hours in a suitcase.

But so what? That’s what a true vacation is about, right?

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OK. So it’s been three months since we went to Switzerland, but I’m not done posting images. I’m just catastrophically slow at updating my blog now that I have my own business (by the way, check out our killer website, designed by HeyDay Creative).

On top of that, our little family has decided to move to a bigger house. Where this house will be, we don’t know yet, but getting our current place ready has been pretty consuming. The plus? Eventually, there will be new wall space in a new home to decorate with enlargements of Switzerland.

Switzerland still sneaks up on me and blows me away with what we saw. Will I ever see a landscape more beautiful than the Berner Oberland? Will I ever experience a better network of trains? Will I ever attempt to eat a three-foot-long coiled sausage bathed in brown onion sauce?

The answers are: No. No. And hell no.

For the last three major trips we’ve gone on — Mexico, Kauai and Switzerland — we’ve rented a couple of lenses from BorrowedLenses.com. Each time, we’ve made sure to rent a tilt-shift lens.

Now I have never pretended to be the most technically aware photographer. I couldn’t begin to accurately tell you how the optics inside these lenses work. All I know is that a tilt-shift warps the field of focus so that you can manipulate the scene in all sorts of wacky ways. With a normal lens, the field of focus is always parallel to the front of the lens. With a tilt-shift, you pivot that plane in all sorts of weird angles.

There, that’s the best I can do to explain it. Wikipedia is more eloquent.

On Lake Lucerne, we took a day-long boat tour, and that’s where the Canon 45mm TS-E really came most in handy. As paddle-wheelers and charming villages passed by, I set the aperture to a narrower depth, pivoted the lens down (or sometimes on a diagonal) and fired away.

While tilt-shifts can often miniaturize a scene, I find that they can actually show a place in a way that is more true to how the eye sees it and how memory imprints it. Take for instance, the image above. In my memory, the hills, the water, the trees — they are all splashes of color, nothing more. But the structures, the boats and mostly, the feeling — that’s what resonated and stuck with me most. A tilt-shift can capture just those memory burners. They’re fun images to share: “this is how it looked, but this is how I remember it.”

The same goes for this image of Wengen. No other shot I took of this town showed just how nestled in the valley it really was. A standard 45mm wouldn’t have done it as well.

To that, I say “yay, tilt-shifts.”

(Click on image for a larger view).

The highlight of my trip to the Trappers Lake and the Flat Tops area was hanging out with my dad in a rustic, 400-square-foot cabin in the woods. I cooked up spaghetti with red wine sauce one night, and we polished off a bottle of Plungerhead — which plunged my head pretty badly the next morning, but man, it is such a good wine.

Sure, the lake was beautiful. Sure, the respite from the city was needed. But there’s nothing that compares to good conversation with a good friend over good food and good wine. It made the trip.

While we chatted, I set up my Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod outside the cabin and captured two 20-minute exposures of the night sky with a Canon 24mm f/1.4. This is a situation where the quality of this gear really comes through. Both the camera and the lens are remarkably clear when it comes to shooting the night sky.

There were other guests at the Ute Lodge cabin resort, and since it was so dark out there, I set up a bright white plastic chair next to the tripod so no one would run into my rig. The end result, was pretty cool.

I love star-trail shots. Photography is 99.5% about capturing a moment. This 0.5% of my repertoire is about capturing our place in the spinning heavens. If you look closely in the above image, you might be able to see a straight dotted line, the product of a satellite passing overhead. I had not had this much fun shooting the night sky since Puglia, Italy in 2008. Maybe when I return to the mountains in early October for fall color, I’ll give it another shot.

Summer’s end is fast approaching, which usually means two things in Colorado: luscious Palisade peaches are in season, and most of us are wondering whether we got into the mountains enough.

I started this summer with plenty in the way of mountain time, but they weren’t my mountains. They belonged to the Swiss, and they were ridiculously beautiful. But just recovering from the stresses of that trip meant a good three weekends in a row at home with our little family. By the time we unburied ourselves from the laundry, recharged our businesses, and spent adequate time with extended family, it was late July and I hadn’t seen the Rockies up close in months.

Fortunately, I had a father-son fishing trip on the books, and so on the second weekend of August, my Dad and I strapped a pair of lake kayaks to his pickup truck and set forth to Trappers Lake — one of Colorado’s rare gems, and the birthplace of the American wilderness movement. It was here in the early 1900s that a surveyor named Arthur Carhart told his boss that Trappers Lake needed to be preserved in its wild state for the good of mankind. His boss was a resort developer. Mr. Carhart had some cojones, and thank God he did. The concept of preserved, roadless wilderness is one of the best things about America.

A full 11 years ago, I circumnavigated Trappers Lake with my backpacking buddies. To this day, it was the most ambitious backcountry adventure I’ve done — and its a sweet nostalgic memory, too. Three nights, three lakeside campsites, and more than 30 miles of schlepping. We started at Trappers Lake, ended up clear across the 200,000-acre Flat Tops Wilderness Area, and came back. Two years later, almost the entire area would burn to the ground in one of the many massive wildfires that consumed Colorado in the summer of 2002. I had yet to go back.

It took much of Saturday to get to the White River Valley east of Meeker. Dad and I checked in to the Ute Lodge, a small rustic cabin resort tucked in the woods, whipped together some dinner, and then set off for the lake at sundown. The devastation of the fire was shocking, even nine years later. Empty pine trees covered the hillside like 500,000 upright matchsticks. The ground cover had returned, and returned with a vengeance. Thick green stands of grass covered the adjacent hillside, and along the road in the burn area, fireweed lived up to its name. Both of us found the scenery to be haunting yet beautiful.

At the lake, a profusion of wildflowers greeted us. Columbine, rosy paintbrush, dusky beardtongue, and goldeneye surrounded the trail and wrapped around the lake’s shore. We had come to kayak and fish the lake, which was turning out to be a lot more technically difficult than we imagined. The lake sits a quarter mile from the nearest parking lot, and the two access points were far from boat ramps. One was a wilderness portal trail that banked steeply up loose rocks and curved by the willow-covered outlet and shore. The other dropped from a parking lot down through meadows, but required a long uphill haul at day’s end. With two 12-foot kayaks and fishing gear, this wasn’t shaping up to be an easy launch.

We returned the next morning, and while I seized on the morning light and photographed the fields of wildflowers, Dad assembled the fishing gear and tried to figure out the day. We shore-fished for an hour, which was completely unproductive, and upon returning to the car, we came across an older gentleman who had collapsed on the trail. He was in a cold sweat, and his legs were rubber. I thought we were witnessing a heart attack. Fortunately, he was coherent, and with a little help, we coaxed him 100 yards down the slope to the parking lot where his sons met us. The altitude had completely nailed him, and we were hopeful his kids would do the right thing and drive him to lower altitude. While Dad and I are both fit and can handle the altitude, we’d seen enough. We opted for the other access point for the kayaks.

By noon we were in the water — the hike down from the lot wasn’t nearly as bad as we had imagined. Dad hooked into a cutthroat, but that would be the extent of our fishing success for the day. Trappers Lake has some of the state’s biggest native cutthroat trout, but everyone on the lake was noting that the fish were taking the day off. ”It is too hot and sunny.” “The hatch isn’t on.” “They aren’t hungry.” “It’s too windy.” Whatever. It was still lovely being out on the water.

By day’s end, however, it was beginning to get buggy. Not only are the dead, burned-up trees hard to look at after a day or so, but they’re clearly a breeding ground for mosquitos. Or maybe it was the tall grass and willows. Or maybe it was both. Either way, we lugged the kayaks back up the hill, both arms too occupied to swap at the little suckers. We strapped the boats to the pickup roof, and set off back down the winding dirt road to the Ute Lodge. We had one Samuel Adams in the cooler, and at a beautiful spot where the White River passes through beaver dams, we pulled over, threw down the tailgate, and split the beer with sunset.

After all, that’s what the trip was about: Dad, me, the two of us catching up, seizing the summer and a rare chance to get out of town together. It was the best beer of the year.

It took nearly an hour to discover what was happening.

We had hiked up to this meadow just outside Zermatt, on the trail that eventually leads to Zmutt and the North Face of the Matterhorn. It was getting hot, and Varenna was inspecting the gravel on the trail, handing her best specimens to Mom, and then pushing her stroller like the big girl she was proclaiming to be (“bick guhr! bick gurh!). We were all content, and not planning to go too far. After all, this appeared to be it: the iconic view of the Matterhorn, the one that conjures visions of alpenhorns and men yodeling “Ri-co-la” into the crisp glacial air.

But as we turned to head back to town, the moon was suddenly quite noticeable and on a very interesting course.

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And so, over the course of maybe 20 minutes, it swooped low, landed on the summit of the Matterhorn, and temporarily turned the world’s most famous mountain into a Santa hat.

It disappeared, then reemerged, like an arrow piercing the heart of Switzerland and coming out the other side. It was our second-to-last full day in the country, but it felt like an apt conclusion to the trip.

Photographing the Eiger…

Every story needs a bad guy. In the Book of the Berner Oberland, its the Eiger. Its history of mountain climbing is layered with one tragedy after another. From its Wikipedia page:

Since 1935, at least sixty-four climbers have died attempting the North Face, earning it the German nickname, Mordwand, or “murderous wall”, a play on the face’s German name Nordwand.

The mystique of this mountain is palpable the moment you lay eyes on it. From Männlichen, it appears like a blunt arrowhead piercing the clouds. From Kleine Scheidegg (above left), it resembles a lurking sharks fin. Both places are ideal spots for the classic Eiger photograph, but to capture images with a little more nuance, you really have to hike underneath the mountain’s legendary North Face.

We tooled around in the pastures underneath it at the Alpiglen train station (above right), located halfway between Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald, and it turned into one of the most transformative travel moments of my life. I’ll devote a whole blog post to it at some point, but in short, the Eiger began to shed loose ice chunks and snow plumbs in a display that was at once intimidating and exhilarating to witness. Our neighbor at the hotel hiked the North Face trail — which skirts beneath the entire length of the mountain — and he reported that at one point he discovered a single climbing glove beneath the rocks. Who knows how it got there, but it clearly captivated and slightly haunted him just seeing it there.

Photographing the Mönch…

There is not a whole lot said about the Mönch, which I suppose makes its name all the more fitting. It’s the strong and silent type.

Wedged between the Eiger and the Jungfrau, it is easy to put this 13,474-foot mountain in the backseat, but I would imagine that if it were located by itself anywhere else in Switzerland, it would be a major draw for travelers. From certain angles, it appears to be the tallest of the three peaks (its not, the Jungfrau is), and it is punctuated by a large glacier that oozes like an icy, mortal wound from its North Face. But it lacks the Eiger’s steepness and sharp angles, and the Jungfrau’s bulk and dominance. So, you’ve probably never heard of it as a result.

So, naturally, photographing the Mönch typically means photographing it with its neighbors, usually from that stellar view from the Månnlichen, or from Mürren. But its such a majestic beast in its own right, I’d suggest trying to isolate it for a few images as well. As I combed over the shots I came home with, only three really stood out as being just about the Mönch. One was a simple image cropped on the summit, which was simple and arresting just because the mountain is so huge. But I think the above two images tell the story a bit better. On the left is how the Mönch appears as you approach Mürren on the railway, which is an angle that best show’s the pitch of the mountain’s North Face. And on the right is a pair of hikers from near the Eiger Glacier station, who were gazing at the Mönch’s lower wall. They seem to be saying “holy crap” with their body language.

Photographing Staubbach Falls…

The Lauterbrunnen Valley is home to 70+ waterfalls, but hands down the most photographed is Staubbach Falls, which slips off an embankment of meadows and plunges 1,000 feet onto the valley floor, most of it in one unbroken fall. Situated right next to it is the tourist hub and namesake of the valley, Lauterbrunnen, so these falls get plenty of attention and a good deal of the postcard royalties.

I’ll devote a later post to the waterfalls of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, specifically Staubbach Falls and Trummelbach Falls. But I will note here that light conditions are best in late morning when the falls are hit by full sun. Shortly after noon, the spray of the falls catches great backlight, which is also fun to work with.

Photographing Mürren…

Where should you stay in the Berner Oberland?

It’s a question that seems to plague a lot of people based on TripAdvisor’s forums. We spent all six nights in Wengen and would highly recommend it (pros: within striking distance of the trails beneath the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau, easy access to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, first ride up on the Männlichen gondola). Although, next time, we will consider staying in Mürren. For one, this is where Mürren is situated (dead center, below image).

Two, it appears to have the best hiking access in the area, with several trails cruising amongst the meadows below the Schilthorn, and the quickest access to this area’s closest thing to a wilderness area, Hinteres Lauterbrunnental, an UNESCO Natural Heritage Site that is tucked into the back of the valley, and home to several massive waterfalls. Furthermore, from Mürren’s cliff-hanging perch, you could probably throw an Aerobie across the narrow valley into the west face of the Jungfrau. The mountains are as in-your-face as any place I’ve been.

I also found it’s streets and architecture more photogenic than Wengen, Grindelwald or Lauterbrunnen. There is a sector in the middle of town that is filled with older wooden structures typical of life in this valley before tourism. Like much of the Alps, these communities used to be quite poor as they were extremely isolated and depended upon the land and its unreliable climate for subsistence. The old sector of Mürren is a compelling reminder that tourism can completely alter a community’s economy forever.

Photographing the Swiss Life…

Quaint could be the most overused word in travel and tourism. I’d say its second behind charming.

They are so overused by writers that they have come to mean nothing, because any place that is desirable in some sense has been labeled so at some point.

But these two words do exist, and truthfully, travelers are irresistibly drawn to places that are simple, old-fashioned and pleasing to the eye. The rural Swiss aesthetic — particularly in the Berner Oberland — seems obsessed with capitalizing on it.

I’d be lying if I said “I didn’t fall for it.” I’m a sucker for the idyllic life probably because I’m not cut out for it. The back-breaking work… The changing weather… The smell of cows… The low wages …

But to see a wall of perfectly stacked firewood under the eaves of a rustic farmhouse? That’s camera fodder!

These images were taken at Alpiglen, a destination along the Grindelwald–Wengen railway that is situated below the Eiger’s North Face. The train station is literally surrounded by cows, and the trail to the Eiger passes through a working farm. In fact, any area with “alp” in the name indicates an area where farmers take their cows for the summer to feed on pastures and fatten up for the winter. Wengernalp, Grütschalp, Bussalp — this is where you’ll find your traditional Swiss cows and burly men of daunting constitution yodeling “Ricola” into the wind.

They move slow, they have massive bells hanging from their neck, and they have a rather vacant look in their eye. The cows that is.

Here’s my dilemma: I have too many good photos from the Berner Oberland for one post.

This has little to do with me and my photography skills. It has everything to do with the extreme beauty of the area. Never before have I been anywhere as dramatic and scenic as this alpine region smack in the middle of Switzerland. We spent almost an entire week here, and it still wasn’t enough. Every day was different, and we kept moving, but even then, I can’t pretend that I am a fountain of definitive photography knowledge on the area.

But what I did learn, I’m putting here, so hopefully there are a few kernels of insight.

In full disclosure, I ran out of time (and money) in the valley to shoot the following areas: Interlaken, Brienzsee, Thunersee, Jungfraujoch, Shilthorn/Piz Gloria, Schynige Platte, Gimmelwald, Grindelwald, First/Bachalpsee and — tops on my Unfinished Business List — Hinteres Lauterbrunnental.

That’s a ton. In fact, if you are reading this because you are researching a vacation in the area, it may sound like I didn’t see any of the big sights. Not true. There’s just simply that much to see and shoot in the Berner Oberland.

This post covers the following subjects:

• The Lauterbrunnen Valley
• The Jungfrau
• The Jungfraubahn

Part 2 will cover:

• The Eiger
• The Mönch
• Staubbach Falls
• Mürren
• Swiss life
• Cows, cows, and more cows.

I’ve included a Google Map of these places — and where I took these images — at the bottom of this post.

Photographing the Lauterbrunnen Valley…
The only way I can describe this area is to compare it to two places I’ve never been (how stupid is that?) — imagine Yosemite Valley with the Himalaya plopped on top of it. Hyperbole? Not really. The town of Lauterbrunnen, at the bottom of the valley, sits at an elevation of 2,608 feet. In addition to having the 1,000-foot-tall Staubbach Falls dumping huge volumes of water on its head, the town is overwhelmed by the 13,642-foot Jungfrau, which soars over the valley just 4.5 miles away. Basically, in the distance between Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, the Jungfrau rises 11,000 feet higher than Lauterbrunnen, the equivalent of nine Empire State Buildings.

Capturing the beautiful colors and textures of the Lauterbrunnen Valley is easy — capturing its massive scale is extraordinarily tough.

There are three ways to approach this potato — (a) from the valley floor, (b) from just above Lauterbrunnen, and (c) from the top looking down.

I’ve always felt the latter fails to do a place justice photographically speaking, but if you have to get that all-incompassing wide-angle shot from the top, the terminus of the Männlichen lift above Wengen is the place to go (see photo at the top of this post — that’s the view from the Männlichen looking over the Lauberhorn to the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, rather than down into the valley).

A far better option to capture the scale of the Lauterbrunnen Valley is along the cog-railway route from Lauterbrunnen to the town of Wengen. The first view opens up shortly after leaving the Lauterbrunnen train station. The railroad bends uphill, crosses the Weiss Lütschine River and reveals a magnificent view of Staubbach Falls, the town’s chapel, the valley cliffs and the snow-draped Alps in the distance (first photo in this section).

The other priceless view of the valley opens up just before the train reaches Wengen. Make sure you are seated on the right side of the train just after the Wengwald train stop. The view (above) lasts for only 20 seconds or so, but it encompasses the falls, the massive cliffs, the summits of the Breithorn and Jungfrau, and a magnificent foreground of Swiss chalets and emerald pasture. Since you are shooting from a moving train, be sure to have a faster shutter speed. I even went so far to shoot on a motordrive to increase the chances I’d have the right cropping when all was said and done.

Photographing the Jungfrau…
I will admit that I missed a key component to the “Jungfrau’s experience” — at more than 100 CHF roundtrip, we opted to skip the Jungfraujoch, the high-altitude train station situated on the saddle between the Jungfrau and the Mönch that is marketed as “The Top of Europe.” It was sacrificed at the altar of 6 CHF bottled water and all the other gouge-jobs speckled across this beautiful country. We’d just had enough of doling out the cash, and ultimately figured we had plenty to enjoy underneath the Jungfrau.

Frankly, I have never seen a mountain more domineering than the Jungfrau. It’s sheer volume, scale and steepness brought an instant dose of humility. Ultimately, I found dozens of great vantage points to shoot this peak, even during early morning strolls outside our hotel in Wengen, where I snapped this shot. Ultimately, the best place to capture the rugged and imposing soul of the Jungfrau is right underneath it, where trails bisect lush meadows (above image), quaint little trains chug by on the Jungfraubahn and Wengenalpbahn, and traditional Swiss huts are overwhelmed by the mountain’s scale. We took the train to the Eiger Glacier station and hiked down to Kleine Scheidegg and Wengenalp. With our daughter it took the better part of a day, but at every turn, a new face to the Jungfrau was revealed.

The other “must” for shooting the Jungfrau is from the Mürren side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, particularly in the town of Mürren itself, where you face the narrowing chasm of the Lauterbrunnen Valley and the sheer western wall of the Jungfrau. The quaint little choo-choo ride from Grütschalp to Mürren is also great for the precision art form of hanging-out-the-window photography. (Or, you can walk the trails in the area, too, and get the same killer views with better foregrounds … we had a baby on board).

Photographing the Jungfraubahn…

At certain points on the trip, I found myself wondering if certain attractions are more about the Swiss engineering than the natural features of the land. Few tourist draws demonstrate this better than the Jungfraubahn, which burrows into the face of the Eiger, hangs a sharp right, burrows through the guts of the Mönch and pops out at the Jungfraujoch, a snow-and-ice clad saddle at 11,332 feet. There, a whole tourism infrastructure of amusements has been erected, including an observatory atop a rock outcrop called The Sphinx.

The Jungfraujoch is the tallest railway station in Europe, which begs the question: there’s a railway station higher than this? (Yes. The Tanggula Railways Station in Tibet is a ridiculous 16,627 feet high). More incredibly, the tunnel and railway were built between 1896 and 1912. I think lightbulbs were also a rather novel new invention at that time.

Well, Swiss engineering aside, the Jungfraubahn is really a beautiful train to look at, and its bright red trolley cars chugging underneath the burly mountains is really one of the most romantic — and iconic — images of Europe. All along the hiking path between the Eiger Glacier train station and Kleine Scheidegg, there are great views of the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger with train tracks running in the foreground, and since the train goes by roughly every 10 minutes, its photographically like shooting fish in a barrel. What makes it such a striking image is the bright red of the train cars contrasted with the various shades of green and blue in the landscape. You get bonus points if you can somehow capture the wildflowers, too, but I was unsuccessful.

The train + landscape shot is easy pickings. But getting the story behind the train, and the sheer madness of its existence, is another matter. I managed to photograph the fleeting moment of a tourist smiling out the window of the train as it chugged out of the Eiger Glacier station with a tilt-shift (above left). Pure luck, but it was about the closest thing I got to capturing the excitement of the Jungfraubahn.

Part 2 will include more on the area, including the Eiger and cows.

(Click on images for a larger view)

Go ahead. Ogle all you want.

Words often fail me. They fail me the most when it comes to mountains. Grandeur. Majesty. Magnificence. Please: those words are chumps when you are beneath the Jungfrau (above two images), a hulking mountain that towers over the Lauterbrunnen Valley like a glacier clad bully. It’s name (roughly translated as Young Girl in German) is hardly worth dissecting. It makes little sense. This peak is a beast.

It’s neighboring two peaks — the Mönch and the Eiger — fit into a little folktale. The Young Girl protected by the Monk from the frightening Ogre. How quaint. Our first full day in the area — in mid-June mind you — was spent underneath the Eiger’s legendary North Face watching mini-avalanches, snow plumes and chunks of ice fall off its sheer walls. The Eiger is less like Shrek, more like an assassin.

And then there is the Matterhorn, the world’s most recognizable mountain. On the approach to Zermatt via the train from Visp, not a seat is used by the passengers. They are all standing, dangling out the windows hoping for that first glimpse of its iconic, snowclad summit peaking over the shoulder of the hills.

So magnetic is the mountain’s pull, people travel across the world to its remote little corner of the Alps, drop $350 CHF a night at a Zermatt hotel, eat $40 CHF pizza, and simply stare at its broken-nose summit. Slipping under the radar are its equally grand neighbors, like the cut-glass peak of the Weisshorn (above left) or the hulking, glacier-clad eminence of Monte Rosa, the tallest peak in Switzerland. “Meh,” the tourists seem to say with the direction of their turned heads. “Just look at the Matterhorn!”

I’m an English major from The Colorado College, and I remember one particularly frustrating lecture that was devoted entirely to “the gaze.” The implications of a character gazing at another. What does it mean to gaze? To pine? To possess with the eyes? Yawn. Maybe it was because we were reading Wordsworth’s poetry, but I thought it was a rather dumb topic.

But if the lecture was on mountains, then I would have gotten it.

Yes, sitting by a lake and staring at a towering, rippled, snow-covered peak is a noteworthy action. You are possessing something with your eyes. The strength, the unflappability of a mountain that has stood there for eons. An undaunted thing that rules over its subjects. An unmoved mover.

What man doesn’t have some stupid, innate, overinflated sense of self worth that he wants to possess the character of a hulking mountain? I don’t know one.

Lucerne is said to be one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. I still have a lot of Europe to cover, but its hard to imagine a cleaner, more idyllic, more photogenic city than Lucerne. The place seems designed for postcards, coffeetable books and small 1-inch-by-1-inch decorative chocolate wrappers.

To get my best shots in Lucerne, I made my way to these places:

Capturing Blue Hour

There is a certain moment at dusk when an urban landscape looks its best. The grit fades into the shadows, the sky holds an ethereal cobalt, and the light of the buildings and streetlamps twinkle to life. It doesn’t last long, and in Lucerne I only had one true crack at it: the last night we were there. The previous two evenings I was too exhausted and jetlagged, and because the sun sets so late in Switzerland in June, I ducked in early before blue hour happened.

Fortunately, in the limited window I had, I lucked out and found one of the best vantage points in Lucerne. In the Google Map, I’ve labeled this image Jesuit Church at Blue Hour, and it was taken along the northern shore of the Reuss River.

Elements of Lucerne remind me of Venice — the stately bridges crossing placid water, the waterside restaurants with tourist menus in four languages, loads of drunks shouting into the wee hours (just add a thick cloud of rotting fish to the air and it might complete the vibe). This location, I feel, showed Lucerne at its romantic best.

Here’s another angle I played with while I had a quasi-blue hour. Like much of Europe in summer, dusk seems to last forever. It wasn’t really dark until 10pm or so, and since we were traveling with a 1-year-old, it was hard for all three of us to stay up that late. Still, from about 8:45pm to 9:45pm, there is a dwindled light that is fun to work with. From the Lake Bridge, you have this beautiful angle of both the Chapel Bridge and the Jesuit Church, with white swans in motion.

Working With Perspective

The crown jewel of Lucerne is the wooden Chapel Bridge, or Kapellbrücke, which spans the River Reuss on a diagonal. Dating back to 1333, it is historically important on two accounts: It is the oldest covered wooden bridge in Europe and the world’s oldest surviving truss bridge. It’s long corridor is decorated with paintings depicting the city’s history, though, tragically, many of these were lost in the 1993 fire that devastated much of the bridge (a boat moored to the bridge caught fire and it quickly spread).

Draped with colorful pansies and crowned by a stately brick tower, the Chapel Bridge’s exterior captures all the postcard attention. But I found the interior of the bridge provides more opportunities for creative photography. The bridge’s natural linear perspective, its artistic details, and the opportunity to incorporate the cityscape into the shot, all pose unique challenges.

The locations for the above and below photos are listed on the Google Map as Interior Chapel Bridge Shots and Interior Blue Hour Chapel Bridge, respectively.

The Postcard Shot

On the one sunny day we had in Lucerne, I rose early and so did my daughter, and the two of us cruised around the quiet city for a good 90 minutes. She’s only 1-year-old, and usually patient with me and my happy snapping. The biggest thing in Lucerne that really got her excited were the swans, and this location below — labeled Chapel Bridge and Mt. Pilatus — not only kept her happy and smiling, but it produced one of my favorite shots of the trip. I will post some tilt-shift images from here in a later post.

Beauty in the Details

Later on our trip, we went to Zermatt, where it is easy to get lulled into the habit of placing the Matterhorn in the background of every shot. The Chapel Bridge in Lucerne has a similar effect. It’s kind of like that guy at a wedding who seems to poke his head into every person’s photo and mug for the camera. Truthfully, I’m not sure I got enough variety to my Lucerne shots, but one subject that would have been fun to play with more are the town’s murals.

Colorful, vivid and lively, these painted walls decorate a few of the buildings (mostly restaurants) in the old town quarter of Lucerne. This one (above right, labeled Old Town Murals on the map) seemed to depict the harvest season, hell, and all the reasons why I hate clowns.

And this one (Zunfthaus zu Pfistern) suckered me in because I had never seen a golden pretzel before.

Finally, this fairy-tale like mural lies just across from the Harvest/Hell/Clown Show building. My one struggle in all of this was finding a unique way to frame these paintings. It just felt all too easy to crane my neck up and take a picture like a tourist. Oh well.

And because it’s like that dude at weddings who sneaks into every shot, here’s the Chapel Bridge one more time, from a vantage point labeled Quintessential Chapel Bridge.

(Click on images for a larger view)

I recently spent two weeks touring around Switzerland with my wife and our one-year-old daughter. It was a magnificent trip — one of those get-it-out-of-my-system-now kinds of trips while Varenna is young and portable. Ha! That’s at least what we thought when we booked the trip in January. She’s a bit more … mobile, shall we say.

But we had a very good time, and ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised with the images I returned home with. In the moment, we both were a bit distracted trying to keep our daughter entertained, engaged, and safe. We worked hard every hour of the trip, just not on photography. Or so it seemed.

Switzerland is a lavishly colorful place. Blessed with ample rain, fertile soil and some of the most chiseled mountains on this planet, it’s hard to take bad images. And if you are the type who comes home with 2,900 images on an external hard drive that need sorting, correcting and categorizing (I am raising my hand as I type this), an unfortunate thing starts to happen. You become numb to emerald green, cobalt blue and buttercup yellow.

Since Tanager Photography started in 2007, I’ve maintained that I am a color photographer. Tanagers are colorful birds, and they travel great distances. But I found myself appreciating a new aesthetic with my Swiss images, and it surprised me — desaturation. It’s nothing revolutionary, and believe me, I’m not acting like I just invented the iPad here. But as I edited my images and adjusted them, I couldn’t help but get excited seeing some of them transform as I moved the saturation slider to the left.

Our trip took us to four distinct places, each with their own photogenic qualities: Lucerne, with its wooden chapel bridge (above right and below); the Berner Oberland with its hulking glacier-clad peaks and lush pastures; Zermatt with the mighty Matterhorn (top); and Zürich, where scores of clock towers seem to suggest that the Swiss are punctual or something.

I’ll devote a later post to where and what to shoot in Lucerne, but its really all about that picturesque wooden bridge with its colorful flower trellises and multi-hued riverfront. I must have shot every conceivable angle on that bridge, but what rounded out the collection wasn’t a fresh angle so much as it was a treatment. By desaturating, the textures of the wood rose to the surface, making my collection of images on the bridge a lot more three dimensional.

The same thing occurred with my images from the Berner Oberland. Here you have the towering, snowy triumvirate of the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger graced with these verdant green fields — truly one of the most spectacular scenes on earth — and yet, the temptation is to point a wide angle lens on it and turn the saturation up to 11 because that’s how it looks. In hindsight, one of my top pictures from the area was a simple shallow depth of field portrait of a pine-cone decoration hanging on the door of a house in Wengen (second from the top). Easiest shot in the world, and yet, when paired down and drained of its color, it just seemed to complete the other, wide-angle, saturated shots in my collection.

In Zermatt, where the landscape is drier and more harsh, adding a black-and-white treatment here and there seemed to give the land a new interpretation — that of a hostile moonscape covered in ice. I felt that the mountains surrounding Zermatt had been tamed by too much man-made activity (trams, trains, gondolas, cables, roads, girders, pipes, everywhere). Extracting that brutal harshness in the glacial landscape seemed like a nice counterpoint.

Ultimately, what gets me excited about travel photography is the whole collection from a place. Does it tell a story? In Switzerland, that story is buried in the textures of the land, the buildings and the people, and its not so easy to see at first. It wasn’t until I was at home in Denver, working in Lightroom, that I started to see these images come together in a way that was exciting as a whole. It took draining the color from select scenes — an act that defied my style as an artist — to make sense of the Swiss story.

Coming up: mountain porn, waterfalls, tilt-shifting Switzerland and shooters guides to Lucern, Zürich, Zermatt and the Berner Oberland. The Tanager Blog will be a busy place for the next few weeks.