Eagles Nest, Cows and Cake

Today we traveled from Oberammergau to Berchtesgaden. We arrived at the hotel a bit after 11, checked in then went for lunch before going on our tour of the Eagles Nest. We at Restaurant Waldhauser, I had a potato, dumpling and ham dish that had a fried egg mixed in. It felt like a breakfast bowl but was lunch food. Good thing the tour departure point was close to the restaurant because fast meals really don’t exist.

The Eagles Nest in the distance

After eating we went to the tourist office to check in for our tour. Sadly we were informed that we could not travel all the way up to the Eagles Nest since it was snowing up there and it was closed to possible avalanches. So we had to settle for only the tour of the documentation center (history museum) and the bunkers. The tour guide was very informative and explained that the Eagle’s Nest is actually a tea house with three rooms and was not were Hitler lived. He actually lived a little ways down the mountain in a beautiful 30 room home that was bombed at the end of the war then completely destroyed by the German Government in the 1950s. On the mountain were the Hitler lived were also residences of his closest advisers, SS barracks and additional building belonging to the regime. Many of those building were destroyed. The documentation center was recently built by the German Government to inform the German people about this part of their history since much of it is never discussed in Germany. The center was actually interesting; I like the doll house for little girls modeled off Hitler’s own home. Also women could earn bronze, silver or gold crosses depending on the number of children they had (10 kids got you the gold cross). Then we went down into the bunker system, while the system is huge and has over 8 km of tunnels we only saw a little bit of it. The bunker was only open to the US military till the late 1990s then was slowly opened up to public tours in the early 2000s. Overall it was an interesting tour that lasted 3 hours. A lot of good history and interesting little factoids you don’t necessarily learn in school. After the tour we headed back to the hotel. You can see pictures from the Eagle's Nest here.

View from our room.

At the hotel we had cake (the cake was not a lie) because they offer free cake from 3:00 to 5:00 every afternoon. Yay for cake! There were several varieties of cake including cheese cake and pie. We also have cows wearing bells outside our hotel room. We have been seeing a lot of cows but really no sheep. Tomorrow we head to Lake Konigssee.

Comments

The Pumpkin Barron

On October 12th, I had the pleasure of working with the marvelous SunnyRae . The general theme for the shoot was pumpkins but with coordination on outfits with SunnyRae theme evolved into official portraits of an 18 th century Pumpkin Baron. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 1 Westcott Strobe 1 rectangular soft box 1 strip box 1 6x6 silver reflector 2 C-stands 1 light stand Boom arm Color checker clamps Sandbags Backdrop stand Rough canvas backdrop Pumpkins Rough canvas drop cloth Flowers Old trunk Books Letters Wooden crate Fake leaves Chair Tri-level plant stand The set up I wanted to keep this set up a bit rustic yet give the feel of staged aristocratic painting of the time. I started with a plain rough canvas backdrop then placed an ol...

Night Queen

On September 28th, I did a session with May. This session’s theme was designed around a Halloween headpiece I made a couple of years ago but never got to shoot. The vibe of the overall shoot was dark queen. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 2 rectangular soft boxes grids 2 C-stands Sandbags Backdrop stand Fuzzy grey backdrop Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps 2 trilevel plant stands Fake candles Goblets Fake flowers Black fabric Silver fabric Large Styrofoam block Dowel Rods Skulls Fake moss Dry ice The set up I tried to keep this setup simple in nature. I started with the base of a fuzzy grey backdrop to which I added a “throne” made from a large Styrofoam block, some dowel rods, and a piece of black fabric. To that I added two flower pot hol...

Belle Island with Central VA Cosplayers

On October 19 th I drove down to Richmond, VA to attend a Central VA Cosplay Photoshoot meetup on October 20 th at Belle Island. I wanted to go to this event because it was in an interesting location, and I wanted to meet some new cosplayers. For this session I used: Canon R6 2 Speed light Trigger 1 Light stands 24 - 105mm lens Gels Camera Settings: For this shoot, I was transitioning back and forth between being inside an old, dark, abandoned building to bright, sunny woods. Due to the transitions, my settings varied greatly. I mostly shot at ISO 100 except for when I accidently bumped the nob to “Auto” and didn’t notice, so I also took shots at ISO 2500, 3200, 4000, and 6400. The shots at the high ISO actually look fairly decent, and not as grainy as one would expect. My shutter varied between 1/100s to 1/250s with the most common shutter speed being 1/250s. My aperture varied between F5 to F11 with the most common ap...

The Munchkin's Notebook

Search This Blog