News - Rupert Kogler

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Canon EOS 5DII, EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM, handheld
f6.3, ISO1600, -2EV, 1/200sec., 45mm

The weather can change very quickly up there. Even in May there can be heavy snow fall.

The first evening there and I was already happy.

There are just a few very small locations in Upper Austria, where pasque flowers can be found.

When the trees are on fire.

But at least the use of a polarizer during a rainy day can bring out the rich colors of early summer.

An ibex close to the edge as the sun comes up and gently touches Mount Großglockner.

Only bad weather is good weather ;) Stitched panorama of five shots. And accidentally I came super close to also capture a lighting bolt in this image.

That's actually what the seashore nearby Cabo dos Bahias is made of. Colorful stones and other treasure like those you can find in Central Europe in gumball machines. Of course this image shows an arrangement I made, but it only took me about five minutes to collect all these stones and shells.

The sighting of the Orcas is for sure one of our wildlife highlights we could experience so far. But we had another even more exciting encounter in Patagonia. A little more on that in my next and last Patagonia entry ;)

Actually I was just shooting this wonderful tree, as a Patagonian Sierra Fich suddenly appeared and took a seat on one of the branches. Without changing my camera settings, I just pressed the shutter and actually got this very lively guy rather sharp with an exposure time of a 1/6 sec.

We found numerous Arrayán Trees along "our" lake ...


Charismatic wooly residents - Patagonia part VIII

Wednesday, 29 March 2017

The guanaco is a member of the biological family Camelidae (like camels) and can be spotted quite often in Patagonia, which is the mammal’s main habitat. These lovely and often cheeky-looking animals are actually the origin of the domestic llama. Although there are lots of areas where you won’t see just one of these guys for days, there are locations where they can be seen pretty often and sometimes also in larger herds. The open lands of Torres del Paine National Park are a good place to find guanacos as well as the vast Pampas (or Pampas-like landscapes) of the endless open Patagonian spaces. With a size standing between 1 and 1.2 m at the shoulder and a weight between 90 and 140 kg the animals are actually rather tall and can also make a great subject from the far distance.

Charismatic wooly residents - Patagonia part VIII

One of my favorite images of 2016. Fantastic autumn conditions as thick ground fog suddenly came up and the night fell in. I could hear the bull already and was deeply hoping he will appear in the open meadow before the light gets to poor. Finally this lady showed up and of course she was stalked by a bull, which eventually posed perfect behind the female for a brief moment and almost completely hidden by the fog.

Canon EOS 5DII, EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM, handheld
f22, ISO1250, -1EV, 1/80sec., 24mm
(Again I would like to enclose a 50% and 100% crop here.)

Finally I can only say, that I’m very much looking forward to all the new adventures in 2017. Hope you too :)

Some posing in front of Austria's highest summit quite some time before sunrise. One of my favorite shots from this year.

Once again I have to say, that I always deeply enjoy my time in the kingdom of these fantastic mammals. Although it can be pretty exhausting sometimes I’m already very much looking forward to my next ibex trip. Hopefully I can manage to do this as intended. … thank you very much everyone for your interest, hope you liked these series!

Close up of an especially wide opened blossom.

A beautiful and rare one hidden in the treetop ...

… the show began.

These crystals accompanied us during our whole walk through the forest, they were shimmering in different colors and together they looked like a piece of a rainbow. Later, as we left the forest and reached an open meadow, we noticed that there was a huge stunning halo around the sun which we couldn't see in the woods. But all the crystals we walked through before were actually the sun dog at the bottom of the halo. Nature's magic at its best. And since trees and forest always seem a little bit magical to me, I tried to capture the magic of the sun dog crystals together with the magic of the woods.

Gorgeous colors wherever we looked …

Into the sun and onto the alpine stage.

Since the large majority of the remained wildlife in Central Europe is extremely shy and one can be happy to catch a glimpse of an free living animal, it’s really a great experience and awesome opportunity to spend countless hours with these rather relaxed ibexes of this particular area free of hunting. So I could witness how they spend their days and how their natural behavior looks like.

Now there is one more part left, I will probably put online tomorrow. Have a nice day, see you soon!


Workshop results

Tuesday, 7 November 2017

Today I'm pleased to display some images the participants of my latest workshop, which I led around Upper Austria's Lake Almsee mid October, took during this particular day. So, please notice, that all photographs shown in this blog post are not mine. We've been a small group of four people and I was lucky enough to spend the day with three great and motivated photographers named Ulrike, Peter and Wolfgang. To our great pleasure we were blessed with wonderful (weather) conditions most of the time. Fall was on its peak and there was this thick morning fog, I was hoping for, which scattered later as the sun was already higher up and created an amazing scenery for a couple of minutes. As the fog finally vanished and the light got very harsh we've been already pretty eager for some coffee and so we decided to spend some relaxed hours in a nearby tavern where we had enough time for a abundant review of the images we took in the morning. After we all warmed ourselves up we went out to the lake again in the early afternoon and since the cloudless skies still challenged us with the harsh light, we tried our best to benefit from the current conditions by photographing some wild ducks from a very low angle towards the glittering water surface. Next we strolled around in the autumn woods to catch some colorful leaves illuminated by the sun and finally found some nice wildflowers which were still in bloom this time of the year. So, at this point we already had the opportunity to photograph landscapes, wildlife and plants before we focused on landscapes again later in the evening. Afterwards we made an other image review on the notebook (thank you Wolfgang!) and ended up taking some images of the Milky Way ;) Since this was actually a beginners workshop, I'm really delighted about the results and espcecially about their variety which stretches from classic landscapes to small flowers and even some bird images. You'll find three pictures taken by each participant in chronological order here. As far as I know Wolfgang is the only one who did some post processing, so all the images of Ulrike and Peter are actually straight out of camera.

Workshop results

Lovely warm light in the late afternoon.

Dance like no one is watching.

Just fire and ice.

A completely different image, showing a different species, but taken exactly from the same viewpoint as the three kingfisher pictures above.

One can only guess the size of the glacier which stretches behind this mountain ridge. The wall of ice you can see on top of the mountain is probably about 50 to 80 meters high. Maybe much more.


Cozy days part II – Patagonia part III

Sunday, 12 February 2017

Today I would like to post my next set of images from Patagonia. I will show you the second half of a few photographs I took during our relaxed stay in Argentina‘s Lanín National Park around Christmas.

Cozy days part II – Patagonia part III

Not only ibexes make great silhouettes. Also weathered mountain trees do.

I really had to laugh as I discovered this snowdrops stuck in that leaf :)

A creation of wind and sunlight.


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