Winter creates amazing plays of color. The camera often cannot capture these automatically. Photographers therefore have to take action themselves.

In the polar night above the 64 ° latitude reached the direct light of the sun in December even at noon only higher cloud formations, such as this disintegrated storm system off the coast of Lofoten. Nikon D 800 | 16 mm | ISO 100 | f / 11 | 1.3 s

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Nicolas Alexander Otto For landscape photographers, the winter months sometimes have a decelerating character. A big plus is the late sunrises and early sunsets. While in summer the sun peeps over the horizon around a quarter past five in Munich and does not sink again until after nine in the evening, the day is shortened by a few hours until the winter solstice. Then the sun doesn’t rise until eight o’clock and sets again at four-thirty in the afternoon. This is especially great for those who don’t like the morning and those who want to take a nice picture of the roadside in the evening light on the way from work. Of course, this effect increases the further north you live: For comparison, the new day breaks on Rügen on 21. December only at eight thirty. If you dare to go further north, you will come from the 64. Latitude (roughly in the middle of Sweden) in the polar night, where the sun no longer shows itself.

Just as important is the fact that the course of the sun is flatter in winter. This means that the light is also softer when the sun is at its highest point than in summer, where the sun, depending on where you are in Germany, is good 40 ° is higher in the sky. I really enjoy going to the far north of Scandinavia in winter and photographing the arctic light there. In January the sun rises there only so far that sunrise and sunset merge directly into one another. If you add the blue hour, we can photograph through about eight hours in excellent light.

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