Bavaria Landscape Photography - Exploring | MasterPlan Mountaineering

This is the first blog in a three part series from a long weekend of Landscape photography in southern Bavaria. I recently moved to Munich and my first visitor was David, who visited for a weekend of landscape photography. This provided an excellent opportunity to explore as the entire area was still very new to me.

This blog focusses on exploring without a specific objective or location in mind, either due to poor weather, or due to needing to get back to Munich from a specific location. While it didn’t produce photos as good as the more thought out locations, it was in many ways far more enjoyable as we were constantly moving, and just stopping when we saw something that we liked.

Poor weather near Munich

The start of our trip did not have good weather, but that was OK as it gave us a few lie ins, and more importantly allowed us to drink some beer and eat some Bavarian food.

Exploring Kochelsee / Walchensee

On the first day which wasn’t forecast to be near constant rain we went for an exploratory road trip down the the alps and then back to Munich. We had no great plan, no compositions in mind, other than exploring one location which we planned to visit a few days later.

We initially headed down to Kochelsee, where we stopped multiple times and went for short walks with the cameras. We started by parking in Schlehdorf which was great until it started raining, then we moved on to another place in Kochel where we could walk down the lakeside. By this point it was feeling like time to find some food, but as we were driving we saw a location we couldn’t help but stop at for a final quick stop at Kochel. Generally we felt that there was strong potential, but that you really needed to be able to see the hidden mountains.

We headed to Walchensee for lunch, where we found an awful cafe which didn’t appear to have any form of social distancing (it was empty when we walked in, but not when we left…). The drive over the Walchensee was brilliant, and needless to say involved a few more stops.

We then drove around the Walchensee, stopping where there was parking when we saw something which had potential. Unfortunately the low cloud was really hiding the majestic scenery, but certainly a place to return to with better light in the future.

The final part of the day was driving between Obernach and Wallgau. The road runs. parallel to the Obernachkanal. This provided plenty of oppertunaties, with bridges, weirs and waterfalls. We stopped in three locations as we drove up, the first gave us a weir, the second a bridge and the third a waterfall, the Wasserfall Obernachkanal.

The second and third locations were the best, the second did involve standing in the icy cold water to get the shot! David did get an amusing photo of me in the water. The third also had the option to walk up Sachensee, but we were getting tired and had to get to Geroldsee to scout the location for a few days later.

An autumnal Obernachkanal Wasserfall, Bavaria

Deutsche Alpenstraße

The next day we drove down to Berchtesgaden for a few days of photography. When we finished there, instead of driving back to Munich we continued our random exploring, but with somewhat better light.

We drove from Berchtesgaden back to the Sylvenstein Lake following the Deutsche Alpenstraße, this was a signposted route which took the scenic route along the German side of the Austrian-German border. This was a brilliant day out, which involved plenty of stops. We basically stopped whenever we saw something we liked.