Posted 1 year ago

Ralph Heksch, Ágnes Kiss, Isa Fröhling and I met up in Bressago in Ticino Switzerland last weekend.

From the moment we met at Bellinzona station on Friday we knew we were going to have a fun weekend, a feeling pleasingly reinforced by Ralph’s wise decision to rush us to the impressive Centro Sportivo Tenero where he works, for our first bottle of the fine local wine.

Saturday morning, and we were back at the sports centre for some action photography but as nobody was moving fast enough (athletes or photographers) we went to plan B and launched Isa’s innovative newspaper boats, constructed during breakfast, from one of the piers off the sports centre beach. We watched as the boats bobbed merrily on the lake, observed the sinking of the first one (Ralph’s construction) and wandered off in search of further photographic opportunity.

Having decided on a lakeside picnic in Ascona we entrusted Ralph to buy the plastic glasses from which to drink the Hungarian wine Ágnes had kindly brought to the party. Possibly with an eye on cost, Ralph had chosen tiny glasses normally used for the serving of schnapps, each holding little more than one mouthful of wine. These needed constant refilling (by Ralph naturally) and caused some amusement to passersby.

In search of the legendary POV over Lago Maggiore, we ascended to Cardada by cable car and chairlift only to find that the warm sunny weather had deteriorated to a grey miasma over the lake and surrounding peaks with occasional brief but exciting sightings of sunlight in the distance as we huddled over our espressos, cameras at the ready.

Sunday dawned cloudy and ethereal. Ralph was perplexed that his lens cap suddenly seemed too large for his lens whereas Ágnes found hers too small in a bizarre equipment confusion reminiscent of the story of the Three Bears. After a short period of puzzled discussion there followed a hasty exchange of lens caps when it became evident that in the frenzy of photographic opportunity or the downing (no pun intended) of too much Prosecco, they had taken each other’s lens caps by mistake the day before.

A quick dash into Italy and Canobbio’s famed market was followed by the short drive to Bellinzona where Isa and Ágnes were to catch their trains home. It was with sadness tinged with the warm feeling that time spent amongst friends leaves, that Ralph and I waved goodbye to Isa and Ágnes, before returning to Bressago where I was to spend one final evening enjoying the kind hospitality of Ralph and his wife Franzisca before returning to Zurich and my flight back to London.

Thanks to Ralph’s thoughtful organisation the weekend had been a success in every respect: much laughter and enjoyable conversation and varying amounts of photography. We now have a race to post our images first on Fotoblur as it is quite possible that we have taken the same ones!!

We are all agreed that our Fotoblur weekend was GR88888888, and I am sure I speak for all four of us when I say that any suggestion of future Fotoblur meetups definitely gets OUR VOTE!!

(Apologies to Ken Ohsawa and Mont Sherar)



http://heksch.ch/images/2011/110330%20AIJR/album/index.html