Sandra Bartocha & Claudia Müller – Pollino NP, Italy II

After a bland sunrise our second day was cloudy so we finally had the chance to take images in the beech forests. They are really impressive as they look completely different from the beech forests in the northern parts of Europe.
The grey bark is covered with many different lichens and every tree looks different. The various shades of grey, the colours and structures offer many possibilities to play around – photographing macro images or just capturing graphic impressions. We really had to hurry to capture as many different aspects as possible as the sun sets at around five and the time frame with daylight is very limited.

After returning to the Agriturismo there was another surprise waiting for us. Giuseppe had invited a friend who plays a traditional Italian instrument, the Zampogna. It’s very similar to the scottish bagpipe but has two pipes instead of one and has been introduced by the shepherds of Basilicata some centuries ago. Together with the other guests of Asklepios, a young Greek couple, we spent the evening … singing, whipping, dancing and playing guitar and other instruments – we had a fantastic evening – but again, without pizza.

Our third day was reserved for administration, as we needed the permission of the “presidente” to photograph within the park (all letters prior to our trip were left unanswered). What we thought could be managed within a short amount of time took us quite a while in beautiful furnished Italian national park offices, waiting for a hell of a lot of people to communicate with each other in order to present us with one signature and one stamp. Thanks a lot to Alexandra for translating.
With the final precious document in our hands we left for the mountains again, researching other parts of the national park, looking for great vistas and other interesting aspects.

In the afternoon it became very windy and clouds were moving into the valleys quite fast. We were up on a plateau overlooking a grand scenic but we were really missing some interesting light. It was an amazing feeling to overlook such a great panorama, with the heavy wind tearing on our tripods.

But we realized once again how dependent one is on good light when taking landscapes. On a trip of four days one must be really lucky to have the perfect light conditions for every aspect. Our mission included many different types of landscape and in order to photograph all types in the perfect conditions the weather should have been like that: A beautiful sunrise for mountain panoramas, cloudy and foggy (of course without wind) during the day to photograph in the forests, an amazing sunset to capture mountains again and then finally clear nights with many stars and without moon to photograph startrails. Of course, we weren’t that lucky but at least we had a cloudy day.

Just for information, we did not manage to eat pizza that day either.

http://www.viaggiarenelpollino.com
http://www.parcopollino.it/Welcome.html
http://www.longoweb.com/parcopollino

Please note that blogs reflect our photographers' opinions and not necessarily those of the directors of Wild Wonders of Europe.