Baden-Württemberg
That is the one sentence that governs planning in Stuttgart, and it is in no forecast. The centre lies two hundred and fifty metres down in a basin whose rim rises to five hundred. Plan the golden hour on the Schlossplatz and you discover it ends forty minutes earlier there than the calendar says. Climb the rim instead — Karlshöhe, Santiago-de-Chile-Platz, the Grabkapelle — and you get the full length of it, with the city underneath as well. The second thing is that wine grows here in the middle of the city. The Stäffele, eight hundred public flights of steps between the vineyards, join the slopes to the valley and are what separates Stuttgart as a subject from every other large German city: rows of vines with a tram behind them. In October, when the leaves turn, that is the best quarter of an hour in the year — and it is ten minutes on foot from the main station.
September and October are plainly the best time here: the vineyards turn, the air is clear and the harvest is on. May to August the bowl is hot — Stuttgart regularly records the highest summer temperatures of any city in this catalogue, and the middle of the day in the centre is not worth working in. In winter the bowl often lies under high fog while the slopes above it stand in sun; that is not a washout but one of the few subjects in Germany you can actually plan for.
Here is where to shoot in Stuttgart, with ideal times and permit notes.
A neoclassical rotunda at four hundred metres, rows of vines all round it and the whole Neckar valley below. The one place around Stuttgart where architecture, vineyard and a view fall into a single frame — and it is open to the west, so you keep the sun to the end.
The best known of Stuttgart’s eight hundred flights, looking out over the roofs and down into the bowl. It is steep enough that every step gives a different camera height and narrow enough that a session runs here without an audience.
The city’s grand square, with its column, its fountains and the palace facade behind. It is wide and open, so merciless at midday and good in the morning — and from ten it is the thoroughfare for half the centre.
A forty-metre cable-net tower that visibly moves as you climb it, in a park of lawns and flower terraces. For families it is the most practical address in the city: space, shade, somewhere for children to be, and a subject within walking distance.
Steep slopes above the Neckar, twelve minutes from the main station on the S-Bahn. The tracks between the parcels are public; the rows themselves are not — which is not a formality but the difference between a welcome visitor and damage to someone’s vines.
These come under the Stuttgart rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Stuttgart itself.
Because the rim of the bowl stands two hundred and fifty metres above the centre. Depending on where you are, the sun goes behind it twenty to forty minutes before official sunset, and after that the light in the valley is flat and blue. If you want the full golden hour you go up — Karlshöhe, the Grabkapelle, Rotenberg. Up there the calendar is right again.
On the paths, yes; between the rows, no. The parcels belong to growers, the vines are easily damaged, and during the harvest they are walked every day. From the public paths you have the better lines anyway, because you are looking along the rows instead of standing in them.
That is an opportunity rather than a cancellation. When the bowl is under fog the slopes above it are often in clear sun, and you photograph across a closed sea of cloud with the city underneath. It can be read off the forecast the evening before, and we move the meeting point uphill rather than moving the date.