One of the most important things in photography is to always have a camera so you make sure you can take advantage of opportunities as they come along… that was really the case on this day…
I had to make a trip from Stuttgart to Dusseldorf for a meeting… since it’s just over 400km, I decided to drive and packed a camera “just in case”… the weather turned out to be very foggy and very cold… this resulted in a lot of frost on the trees and grass verges of the autobahn…. very distracting while driving as you’re not supposed to stop on the side of the road unless in an emergency… I decided to take a detour to visit Burg Eltz as it was on the way (kind of)… only about a 120km detour :-)
Once I was off the Autobahn, the roads took me through many smaller villages… on the outskirts of one village, I came across an orchard of apple trees which were all covered in frost… i actually drove past before deciding to go back and take some pictures… the conditions were magical and I spent quite a bit of time just choosing various trees and compositions… hopefully some of them will appeal to others as well… I also took some detail shots of ivy growing on a wall in the village
After a while, I decided it was time to move on but I must admit I didn’t get very far… it seemed like every corner brought new views which tempted me to stop again and again… one particular set of trees lining a curvy section of road caught my eye so I found somewhere to stop and take more pictures… fortunately there was very little traffic so I was able to play around with the compositions… (full disclosure: I removed some signage and road markers from these shots ;-))
I did eventually make it Burg Eltz but unfortunately it was closed for renovations (suppose I could have found that on their website :-))… the whole valley was covered in frost and would have been really cool to photography earlier in the day (and without scaffolding)… still a wonderful place for a walk through the forest and the end of this little photo adventure as I had to get to Dusseldorf for my meeting