Baden-Württemberg
The Black Forest is a hundred and sixty kilometres long, and anyone treating it as one place spends the day in a car. In practice it divides into three: the north around the Schwarzwaldhochstraße with the Mummelsee and the Hornisgrinde, the middle around Triberg with the waterfalls, and the south around the Titisee, the Schluchsee and the Feldberg. Two and a half hours of driving separate the northern end from the southern one. A session stays in one of the three. The real subject is a temperature inversion. From late September into November the air cools overnight in the valleys, the fog settles in the bottom of them, and at eight hundred to a thousand metres you stand in clear sun above a closed sea of cloud. It can be read off the forecast the evening before, which makes it plannable — unlike almost everything else in this catalogue. The price is the hour: by nine the fog has often burned off, so a session like that starts before sunrise.
Late September to mid-November is inversion season and the strongest time of year. Spring, and May in particular, gives new green and full waterfalls after the melt. High summer is green but monotonous, and busy at the lakes. From December to March there is reliable snow at altitude — the Feldberg has more than a hundred days of it — and a winter session up there is the landscape opposite of everything else in this catalogue. Access roads can be closed then.
Here is where to shoot in Black Forest, with ideal times and permit notes.
At eleven hundred metres the highest point of the northern Black Forest, with a raised bog on top and the Mummelsee a little over a hundred metres below. In an inversion you stand above the fog here; on an ordinary day it is a bare ridge with a long view into the Rhine plain.
A hundred and sixty-three metres of drop over seven stages, with boardwalks alongside. Direct sun is the enemy here — the contrast between water and shade goes past what is usable. An overcast day is the right condition, and in May the fall carries the most water.
The largest lake in the Black Forest at nine hundred metres, with the Feldberg behind it. Eighteen kilometres of shore are walkable, so even in August there is a bay with nobody in it — and in winter there is reliable snow here.
The deep hipped roofs the region is known for stand singly in meadow valleys rather than in villages. From the public tracks you get them with the slope and the wood behind; you go onto a farm itself only when somebody has agreed to it.
A tight gorge with a forty-metre railway viaduct across it, under which a Christmas market stands in December. The rest of the year it is a forest track along a stream, with the light coming down through the firs.
These come under the Black Forest rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Black Forest itself.
You book a flexible date inside a window rather than one fixed day. An inversion announces itself in the previous evening’s forecast — high pressure, a clear night, no wind. We decide that evening and meet before sunrise at eight hundred to a thousand metres. By nine the fog has often gone, so it is a two-hour affair.
Twenty to forty minutes inside one of the three areas, and up to two and a half hours between them. So we put a session in one region rather than across the forest. Which one depends on where you are coming from: the south from Freiburg, the north from Baden-Baden, the middle from Stuttgart.
Better for a small one than a large one. Humanist ceremonies in a clearing or by a lake are common here and straightforward to organise; the civil marriage happens in one of the municipalities, and several have approved venues outside the town hall. What to watch: nature reserves cannot be used for structures, and in winter some access roads are closed.