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Marcel Gross
@marcelgross.ch
Photographer based in Switzerland
I grew up in Switzerland, near the wonderful Alps. Thanks to my parent’s wanderlust, I have had the pleasure to experience foreign cultures since my childhood. All these impressions shaped me and I wanted to get a hold of them. When I first had the chance to travel to Africa as a teenager I bought my first camera. It was a small point and shoot camera with some zoom but not nearly good enough for the unique African wildlife opportunities. A couple of years later I revisited Kenya, and decided it was time for my first DSLR with a 18-250mm zoom lens. Unfortunately, I had little know-how and budget but it’s been a first step.
This was during the time I had started an apprenticeship as a Graphic Designer and now I work as a designer for a wine selling company in Switzerland. Over the years my gear and skills improved, also as a result of my job. I create a lot of print and digital content like advertisements, brochures, flyers, webshop, social media content and so on, but, as a small team, we often struggle to get high quality images from our suppliers and for our own marketing activities. So, today it’s an important part of my job to take these pictures and use them creatively in all the material that I create as a graphic designer.
I also got better by shooting a lot on my travels, on weddings, and on events. It was only when a friend got married and asked me to photograph his wedding that I got into wedding photography. I invested into new gear (like a 85mm-portrait lens) and began learning this new field of Photography. The more I learned about it the more fun it was and I finally started to accompany a few weddings professionally. While the subject and ambience are completely different, the skills and knowledge from wedding photography come in handy with landscape photography. At weddings, there’s quite a lot of pressure not to miss a second to capture every blink, every smile, every expression of genuine emotion.
"This helps me when capturing wildlife, and continuous changes in light and shadows that are dressing a landscape."
Weddings are special, yet, the most fascinating to me remains Nature, Wildlife and Landscape Photography. That’s not surprising as I have absolutely adored wildlife since childhood and I love to be outdoors. Nature documentaries used to inspire me and they still do to today. In addition, YouTube, 500px and Instagram helped me obtain the know-how and gather a lot of information about gear and best practices.
A less common source of inspiration and learning has been the pandemic, which taught me a lot about the amazing wildlife and bird species in Switzerland and where there are the best chances of observing them. As well, I found all the great spots for landscape photography for each season close to my home!
"An example is a photo of the sunrise in the hills of Emmental."
I saw a picture of this spot on Instagram and found out that it’s pretty close to my home – almost on my direct way from home to work! I decided to visit it on a late winter morning for sunrise and the scenery was quite amazing.
With regard to wildlife in my area, I was lucky to spot a fox in the woods of my hometown.
I was checking one of my trail cams to find a fox den (a burrow) with young foxes. Now this wasn’t successful, but walking through the forest I suddenly encountered a beautiful fox sleeping in the middle of the forest. The same happened to my girlfriend, who found a short-tailed weasel near my home when she went for a walk in the hills surrounding my hometown. She called me and after waiting for one hour, the weasel showed up. The last time I had seen one was years ago, so I was happy to be able to photograph one now!
When doing so, holding the camera in your hand is crucial because in wildlife photography you don’t have time to get ready and can’t ask the animal to wait for a bit – when it’s gone, it may be for hours, or days. That is something probably every wildlife photographer has to learn the hard way!
Over the years, I have to say I had quite some lucky moments where I had the chance to take portraits of animals. Some of those still represent some of my best work, whether it’s because of the photo, or because of the emotion attached to it. Let me share some of them with you:
"This portrait of a baby gorilla in Uganda was taken in a lush mountain forest in Africa."
It was not the easiest hike to do since the terrain of the habitat and the dense vegetation takes quite a bit of physical fitness. There was the option to hire a carrier for the heavy camera gear, but to me everything, also the hard and the difficult, is part of the experience and I am somewhat used to alpine hiking, so I decided to carry it on my own. It’s an expensive once-in-a-life-time trip and you only get one hour with the gorillas. It was rainy and very dark, so not ideal conditions to take a good photo. I feel I have been lucky to get a picture like this in such a short time frame of a young gorilla, also considering that most of the family was completely hidden in the vegetation. Fortunately, this youngster was playful and probably curious about us visitors. It even grabbed a girl’s leg and wanted to drag my heavy camera backpack away!
"The second one is special to me because seeing a tiger in the wild was one of my childhood dreams."
We spent over a week on safari in the famous Indian National Parks like Ranthambore, Bandhavgarh, Panna and Kanha. On one of the last game drives in Bandhavgarh we got to see a tigress with her two already full-grown youngsters. This young and beautiful male tiger was walking away from us in the high grass. After another passenger accidentally dropped something inside the car, he turned and approached our safari jeep with an intense gaze – a head-on encounter of incredible thrill. Even in the safety of the car.
The third and last one is quite different from my other shots as it is not showing landscape or wildlife, but portraying children of the karamojong tribe in northern Uganda. The Karamojong are a still quite authentically living African tribe (relatives to the famous Massais in neighbouring Kenya). We visited this remote village in Northwestern Uganda, where few tourists pass by. The children of the community were as excited to see us as we were to see them. They all wanted to have a picture of themselves and showed us some local practices, like how to take blood from a cow without harming the animal. They mix the blood with milk and drink it as part of their nutrition. We respectfully refused to taste this mixture, but this was an encounter that contributed dramatically to my world vision and broadened my understanding – again – of the diversity of ways of living life on our shared planet.
After all, each trip and place brought me unique and unforgettable knowledge, emotions, experiences and inevitably, personal growth. Nevertheless, by far the most important project was my 409-day America Trip back in 2014-2015. First, I rented a car with a rooftop tent and traveled through large parts of western North America. From California, Nevada and Utah through the Canadian Rocky Mountains and up North to the untamed Yukon and Alaska. That’s where I learned and practiced a lot for my photography. Then, I went down and explored the gems of South America.
When I woke up in my rooftop tent and had a first glimpse of the day, I saw two big grizzlies. First I thought I was dreaming, but in less then a second I only thought about how to safely take my camera from the car beneath me. I decided that they were far enough away so I climbed down the ladder, entered the car and started to take pictures. They stayed in the area for a couple of hours, even pretty nearby, and seemed completely undisturbed by my presence. When I was about to leave the two of them, they were rubbing their backs on a roadside pole. That was an absolutely once-in-a-lifetime moment I will never forget. As I wrote in my blog: “At 1 p.m. I finally took a record-breaking 577 photos. Much will be useless considering the unfavorable lighting conditions, but there are some pictures that I couldn’t have dreamed of.
"The pictures were later printed by various media such as the English daily newspapers the Sun or the Times, and are known as the “pole dancing grizzly bears.”
It has been these 409 days through the Americas that transformed my life, and boosted my photography. I had a lot of time, I learned a lot about the incredible countries I was fortunate to visit, their people, wildlife, culture and rich history and last but not least, about myself. You can find my itinerary on my website, and would only encourage everyone to create their own unique once-in-a-lifetime trip – the transformational effect it has on you will live within you for the rest of your existence.
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