The tourists:

By looking at the provided map you may notice that I took most of my images at the outer borders of the city. This is where I found the most attractive scenes, and it wasn’t as busy as the city centre around sunset.

By the way, despite choosing the less crowded areas in the evenings during a year with only 50% of the usual number of visitors due to the coronavirus pandemic, I still had a hard time getting my preferred, tourist-free images.

A lot of patience, a little bit of luck and some retouching helped me to get the desired results in the end.

Parking:

There are five main parking areas (P1-P5) around the city walls, providing space for roughly 1,000 vehicles and quick access to the old town.

During our visit we always found a place to park our car, but I can very well imagine it will be much harder during non-pandemic times with approximately 500,000 people usually visiting Rothenburg per year.

In my opinion the fee of € 5,50 for a day ticket is quite reasonable.

After parking your car at P5 (Bezoldweg, geo-coordinates: 49.380352, 10.177379) and passing the gate in the west, you will find after only a few meters the first highlight: St.-Wolfgang’s-Church, also called Shepherd Church.

The fortified, late Gothic church was built between 1475 and 1492 upon the very place the shepherds used for praying to their patron, the Holy Wolfgang, begging him to protect their herds from the raging wolves. They held this special service every year on Tuesday after Bartholomew’s Day and went afterwards to the “Lambswirthaus” at the marketplace for food, drinks and dance.

Today you can still admire the building in its unaltered and unique appearance: from outside the city walls as a fortification with mighty walls and embrasures, and from the inside as a church with elaborate, late Gothic tracery.

Since neither the light, nor the clouds worked to my favor, I decided to include the arch at the “Klingentor” in a way to nicely frame the church and cover great parts of the rather uninteresting sky I had to deal with that afternoon. (viewpoint geo-coordinates: 49.380194, 10.176403)

Due to the very close foreground (the stone arch) I was not able to achieve acceptable sharpness throughout the image by stopping down. I had to take multiple exposures with varying focus points that I blended during the postprocessing. Most of the times I do fail with this technique called focus-stacking, not at least because of the bad implementation of this function in Photoshop. For a change I succeeded after some manual corrections this time. Sooner rather than later I will purchase the program “Helicon Focus” that was developed especially for focus-stacking and gave me way better results when I tested out the trial version some time ago.

By turning westwards from the viewpoint of my image “Framing St.-Wolfgang’s-Church” and following the “Klosterweth” path, you will pass one of the countless towers after 100 meters, and the way will then turn south. There is a nice composition waiting for you - featuring the Monastery Tower (German: Klosterturm) that was built around 1400 and named after the nearby former convent of the Dominican Sisters. In comparison to the many beautiful scenes Rothenburg has to offer this is a rather unspectacular area, but by including the little gate in the foreground you can achieve a compelling composition.

For my image “Composing the Ordinary” (viewpoint geo-coordinates: 49.379644, 10.175298) I had to use focus-stacking again to get sharp details from the foreground to the background. You can clearly see the difference this technique makes by comparing the image to the second shot I took of this scene some days later, using only one image with focusing on the tower. Have a look at the much blurrier details in the upper left corner of the second version! Since I didn't like the shadows on the left side caused by the direct sunlight in the second version, I had no interest in the extra work needed for a focus stack.

You will find a beautiful view of the “Röderbogen” and the 27 meter-tall Markus Tower at the corner of “Rödergasse”/”Paradeisgasse”. The tower, built around 1200, was used as a prison until 1844, and you can still find remains of the old pillory at the tower’s south side. The “Röderbogen”, an elevated extension of the wall-walk and presumably part of a former, mightier gate and building with portcullis and a drawbridge, was erected around 1560.

I was really lucky the evening I took the image “Daddy is coming”. Not only did the sun, that had already set, cast beautiful colors onto the clouds, but I was also able to capture an incoming stork - blissfully awaited by the fledglings in their nest on the Markus Tower.

The postprocessing of the image (viewpoint geo-coordinates: 49.377118, 10.182140) was rather complex, since I had to blend 9 exposures - taken at different moments in time - to achieve the result I was going for.

The foundation was set by using the exposure with the great looking sky as a base layer, complemented by another image I took shortly after, when there were no people on the street. Due to the increasing darkness I had to constantly drag my shutter speed which caused the moving fledglings to appear blurry in most exposures. I used one of the few sharper exposures as a third layer, giving me a clean look of the birds in the nest and also enabling me to correct the blown-out highlights at the “Hotel Markus Turm”. Layer No. 4 provided the in-flight image of the stork, whereas I used No. 5 for a shorter exposure of the base layer to bring out the sky’s colors better. I added another layer to blend in the illumination of the street and the “Röderbogen” that came much later to life. Layer No. 7 was a shorter exposure of the illumination capture, enabling me to restore the blown-out highlights of the lamps. For a final touch I blended in another two images taken with f/16 instead of the usual f/8 aperture, giving me nice starbursts around the light sources.

Built in the 13th century, the Röder Tower was initially a shell tower, and its open side facing the city center wasn’t closed until the tower’s defense purposes became obsolete.

With its four corner oriels, the tower’s appearance was originally similar to the one of the “Stöberleinsturm”, but the roof was heavily damaged after being bombed in 1945, and the inside wooden structures burned out completely. The half-timbered upper part was erected after WWII, such that the Röder Tower now looks quite different than the original building.

The image “The Tower Blues” (viewpoint geo-coordinates: 49.376678, 10.184487) is merely a by-catch that went into my nets when I was waiting for my wife to pick me up after I had photographed the Gerlach Forge during the blue hour.

Captured at 26mm, I was close to the short limit of my beloved Tamron SP 24-70mm F/2.8, and I had serious problems correcting the converging lines during the editing process. Furthermore, I made a mistake while taking the bracketed exposures, so I wasn’t able to recover the highlights in the shop windows.

Since it was already too dark for a decent result, I didn’t expect a portfolio-worthy image anyway, but at least I got a pretty souvenir picture.

Due to the 1356 Basel earthquake the old castle as the nucleus of Rothenburg city didn’t remain intact for posterity, although the amount of damage the earthquake did to the building is a controversial issue among researchers, since the then already advanced decay of the castle can’t be reliably assessed. The Castle Gate and the Castle Tower were built after this natural disaster to keep the west city entrance safe from invaders. There used to be a moat in front of the gate and you had to use a drawbridge, on which only the running grooves at the tower are still recognizable, to access the castle area. The romantic looking gate system, serving as a substructure for the Gardener´s House since the 17th century, was examined archaeologically in 2007 for the first time.

In photographic terms both versions of this subject (viewpoint geo-coordinates: 49.376530, 10.174700) weren’t very challenging. In my opinion the only thing worth mentioning is that I had to shoot the first image with my ultra-wide-angle lens at 17mm, since I didn’t want to tilt the camera upwards (to avoid converging lines), but still get the tower’s spiral completely within the frame’s borders. I had to crop a good amount of the rather uninteresting foreground in post, so I ended up with a low-res image here. For the second version with the low vantage point I used focus-stacking again, so the near foreground is as sharp as the Castle Gate and the Tower.

Seemingly straight out of a Grimm brother’s fairy tale, the Gerlach Forge is a surprisingly new building - at least in its appearance nowadays, which only dates back to the years 1950/51.

The original building, a barn with a masonry gable, was destroyed in 1945 during WWII, as well as 40% of all the city structures.

The emblem of the crowned snake at the forge’s gable was designed by Georg Gerlach around 1950 and is showing a hammer and pliers as the traditional tools of the blacksmith’s craft.

Below you can see a horn which was used as a bugle during the horse shoeing.

If you follow the “Untere Schmiedegasse” to the south and turn right into the “Kobolzeller Steige” at the “Plönlein”, you will find the stairs leading up to the Kobolzeller Tower on the left after a short walk. Once at the top go straight on with the tower on the right, then turn right after a couple of meters. You will find two beautiful views on Rothenburg up here: one in the direction of the setting sun with the western part of the old town and the Castle Tower on the left (“Rothenburg Nightfall”), and one following the northern direction of the “Hirschweg”, showing not only the towers of the St. James and the St. Johannis Church, but the one of the town hall as well (“Blues on the other Side”).

I used the timeblend technique in my image “Rothenburg Nightfall” again, hence being able to blend in the illumination of the tower and the windows into the shot with the feathery clouds above the city, which I took shortly after sunset. In the beginning I wasn’t satisfied with the blending: I had hoped for way more lit windows, and in contrast to the sky the city had a strong blue color cast. I had to push the white balance of the city part a good amount to the warmer side to achieve a coherent result. When I realized most of the windows would remain dark, I didn’t have to change my position to photograph the other view (“Blues on the other side”). All I had to do was remove the telephoto lens, attach my standard 24-70, mount the camera vertically and pan to the right.

The Kalk Tower was built in the last quarter of the 14th century as a guard tower and offers a beautiful view on the old town today. With a bit of diligence in the field you can use the tower’s arch to frame the city in your image.

When my family and I were exploring Rothenburg, we somehow managed to miss the Spital Quarter. I don’t think we were the only tourists making this mistake, since it was far less crowded here than in the rest of the old town, despite the fact this area of the city is definitely worth a visit. It has a lot to offer: the “Roßmühle”, the “Reichstadthalle” and last but not least, the Spital Bastion, responsible for the quarter’s name.

We were made aware of the beauty of this district and the Kalk Tower view during our city tour. While my wife and my kids enjoyed a some ice cream afterwards, I walked back to the Spital Quarter to photograph the nicely framed view of the city (viewpoint geo-coordinates: 49.371948, 10.178426).

To be able to get a sharp representation of the arch as well as the middle ground and the city in the background, I had to use focus-stacking again.

The Spital bastion was built by Leonhard Weidmann in the 16th century, and with its seven gates, a portcullis and a drawbridge made for a mighty fortification of the city. After breaking through the first gate attacking troops reached the “Fanghof” that can be seen in my image “Tree in the Trap”. With the help of the portcullis, the escape from there was prevented, and the Rothenburg guards could still attack the invaders from the safety of the wall-walk. For the extension of the city walls to enclose the Spital Quarter and the bastion, the builders used (among others) stones from the old castle, whose fate was sealed at the latest with the Basel earthquake of 1356, as the attentive reader may recall.

Despite using the short end of my ultra-wide-angle lens (14-24mm) I had to back right up to the wall behind me to capture the whole tree in a horizontal aspect ratio (viewpoint geo-coordinates: 49.370842, 10.181031). During the editing process I decided to utilize the “Indian-Summer” effect of the NIK collection to give the old tree a much more autumnal appearance.

I hope you have enjoyed my Rothenburg photography guide and that you didn’t mind the historical background information I provided along with my images. As mentioned earlier: this location list is far from being complete, but if you stroll through the city attentively you will find rewarding photography subjects at every corner, since Rothenburg is just an outstandingly beautiful city.

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