This Place Is Epic!

Ever since I first stumbled across Lünersee I was looking forward to experiencing its spectacular and stark beauty. It didn’t disappoint.

The Weather

We stayed in the area for four days and I prioritised our day at Lünersee on what I thought would give us the best weather for it, and I do believe I nailed it. The day after this was rainy with low cloud – we wouldn’t have seen a thing – and the other two days were mostly clear blue skies – obviously better than the rain, but not the fantastic atmosphere we actually got from the scattered cloud.

We were also lucky enough to have glassy conditions for the first half of the walk, and I love those reflections in the turquoise surface.

Panoramas

Lünersee was a fantastic spot for panoramas, and other than the one immediately above, which is a single frame crop, the remainder are multi-shot, stitched panoramas taken hand-held.

Years ago I got a panoramic head with a nodal rail, spending a lot of time getting it all “just right”. Over time I’ve realised this is only necessary if you have objects close-ish to the lens, and that for the sort of panoramas I tend to take, even hand-holding produces great results.

A few tips to keep in mind when taking a pano hend-held:

1. Keep the camera level. You don’t want your pano going up or down hill, though software nowdays does a lot to compensate for this.
2. To reduce the chances of parallax issues, avoid having any upright objects, like trees or large boulders, close to you. This is where the relationship between two objects changes more than a little between frames, which will cause stitching problems. The closer something is to you, the more likely this is to occur.
3. To further minimise parallax issues, try to rotate around the camera, not yourself. I imagine a pole running through the lens just in front of the camera body and try to rotate the camera around that.
4. Take images with your camera in portrait orientation to maximise the resolution of the final image, which gives a lot more scope to crop in.
5. Shoot at faster shutter speeds to avoid the possibility of camera shake induced blur. If you do have to shoot at slower speeds, be very mindful to pause and steady between shots.

Race to the Top

We (I) decided to head up to the top for a fantastic view of the lake and mountains…the only problem was as soon as we headed up the clouds began gathering, obscuring the mountains. I was afraid by the time we reached the top we’d not even be able to see the lake, but thankfully there was just enough of the view visible that you can still tell the lake is surrounded by mountains, even if you can’t see them all.

We sat up the top having lunch for almost an hour, and by the time we left you could only just see the lake…lucky we got up there when we did! Of course just as we got towards the bottom all the clouds parted and all the mountains were again visible. Bad luck in some ways, though I’m happy with the atmosphere in the shot below.