Plitvice Waterfalls in Winter, Croatia

How to stop time?

Days keep passing while constantly working, and we just work, eat, sleep and work again, then you realize, another week, another month has just gone by. I had no time to write anything on the blog. Many concerts to shoot... will have to catch up with my latest thoughts on subject of music photography. For the time being, something really fresh - trip to Plitvice National Park in Croatia.

Plitvice, Croatia
70mm, 2 minutes, f/16, ISO 100

One day few weeks ago I called my photographer friend Andreas to check on things, and all of sudden I was planning group trip to Croatia, to shoot winter around Plitvice Lakes. I wanted to visit this national park already for a long time, and now it was a good moment. Quickly re-adjusted my calendar and last 3 days we spent in deep snow in Croatia.

Amount of snow I had to deal with over there completely overwhelmed me. I was expecting some, but not that much. Andreas mentioned something about taking snow shoes. I bought new ones and was almost certain I would not need them. How wrong I was. 

Mario and Dieter probing the snow trying to find the route to overcome fallen tree.
See how deep the snow is, check Dieter's skiing stick sunk in the snow.

Generally in winter Plitvice National Park is closed, but this is the best moment to quietly visit this amazing area. There are no tourists, for two days we have not met anybody! Can you imagine that?!

This was good news, the bad news was that whole track leading to Cascade was covered with untouched over meter of snow. When you are in good shape you need about an hour to reach first waterfall... when you are in good shape... obviously I have to work on that. Tackling fresh snow even with snow shoes on is extremely hard, I thought it would be easier. You step on with right foot, with snow shoes on, it immediately sinks for 30-40 cm in snowy powder, then you move you left leg, this one ends up deep in snow as well, then you have to pull your right foot out of the snow, and this time you pull it with the snow on the surface of snow shoe, so obviously heavier, and you have to make those few kilometres ahead.... and come back. Thanks god I was not alone. Dieter, Andreas, and Mario, more advanced and they were leading the party. I had this luxury for longer parts of the route to follow the guys using their tracks. I need to work-out a bit more. 

When you get there, the view is simple amazing, breath-taking. Constant sound of running waters around you and nothing else. Pure nature in its purest form, and looks so much different calm in winter. In such moments you simply forget the pain in your legs, and hours spent on reaching the location. You are completely lost in the surrounding and absorbing everything around you. 

Then comes the moment... you start shooting. Unfortunately we did not have the best weather conditions in terms of light, and later also it started to snow heavily during 1st day. Shooting under falling snow becomes quite difficult with longer exposures, your pictures have tons of thin white strokes caused by falling snow flakes, and then comes technical issue, almost after every shot you have to clean the lens, especially when you shoot wide angle, lens hoods are too short to prevent snow from falling on front glass element. 

Plitvice Falls in Winter.
3 pictures taken with 24mm tilt shift lens. 1/2s, f/8, ISO 50

There were four of us, each with different approach and having different goals, used different focal lengths, and different techniques. It will be interesting to see our final results next to each other. I hope it will be possible in few weeks. I was heavily depending on filters, as usual, I just like to get everything right in the camera to reduce to minimum post processing. When shooting waterfall and trees and bright sky above, it is quite hard to capture all details in the sky preserving all shadows' details at the same time. On those heavy overcast days perhaps it was a bit easier but I still dug out filters from my backpack.

Jerzy, Dieter, Franz. Plitvice, Croatia

I love long exposures. To photograph waterfalls you need those. Days were grey so using slow shutter speeds was not really an issue. Simply going with lowest ISO of 100 or 50, and by closing down aperture to f/11 or f/16 you could easily slow down the camera to 1/10s. By putting polarizer on you could get 1/2s exposures. This when falling waters create those great ethereal streams with sense of movement. I wanted to go further and wanted to blur water even more and put on my beloved 10 stops big stopper from Lee. Theoretically it takes 10 stops of light, but in fact it is stronger, I loose around 11 stops.... in this case even better.

Plitvice in Winter, Croatia

For this shot I went extreme.... first of all this is only middle section of 4 pictures panorama. Then I went nuts with filters. I used three! 2 stops ND soft soft to darken the sky and higher trees, then 1 stop soft grad placed upside down to darken foreground snow. Without filter it would be overexposed, and finally 10 stops to get extremely long exposure... in this case it was 1.5 minutes. Camera set manually to 10.000 Kelvins. I mentioned before in older posts, that Lee's big stopper has very strong blue cast thus the picture is so blueish... however I kind of like it. I might change my mind later, but for now this is the version I use.

Then I also played with gold-n-blue polarizer to get some different colour effects. Some of them are quite stunning. Have closer look.....

Iron Maiden's Eddie went with us to Plitvice

Do you see Iron Maiden's Eddie's face in the water?

Cool, isn't it?

I have another version with blue cast and there Eddie seems to be smiling :)

There are more shots I have to finish processing and make final selection. Just wanted to share one more. We were clearing table after breakfast and tossed some bread crumbs for birds. Within few minutes two jays showed up attracted by free food. What an opportunity! We quickly got our long lenses and started to photograph.

Jay taking on our bread crumbs

Photo chances are everywhere, in this case we literally stood inside the house and kept shooting.

Awesome trip. Thanks to Andreas for organizing it. It was also great to get to know personally Dietrich Gloger, Mario Maindl, and Franz Kaufmann.

I will come back to Plitvice in Autumn to get fully coloured Autumn moods this time.