At the end of June 2014 I had the chance to do a pre-shoot with two paragliders - Paul Guschlbauer and Tom de Dorlodot - to announce their next big adventure called the ‘Adriatic Circle’. The project was a hike-and-fly trip starting and ending in Ancona, Italy, crossing six European countries by travelling over 2000km either by foot or paragliding. We met at the beautiful lake Königssee in Berchtesgaden, Germany to do some portraits, lifestyle and action shots.
After shooting the first portraits and some hiking shots in the morning we started with the action shots. Taking photos of aerial-sports can be pretty hard if you are bound to the ground, especially if you want to include the scenery. That is why we also tried to get some nice ‘air to air’ shots.
But how does a photographer get airborne? With a paragliding tandem which allows the photographer to fly together with a pilot.
Shot after shot the light got better and the sky became more dramatic over lake Königssee. After almost two hours of flying my stomach felt a bit queasy. Usually I don’t get sick easily while flying, but constantly looking through the viewfinder makes it quite challenging. This shot was one of the last we did and after landing we were pretty happy with the outcome. Even though my face was a little green after the shoot it was an awesome experience!
The camera I used for this shot was a Nikon D4 with a Nikon 24-70mm 2.8 zoom lens to be flexible with the focal length. Because I know flying can be a little bit shaky I decided to go with a fast shutter speed of 1/1600 and an F-stop of 5.6.