Hello! My name is Stefan Forster. I was born in 1986 close to St. Gallen in Switzerland. I started taking pictures at the age of 18 with my first digital SLR camera. At the time, I was doing my apprenticeship as a mediamatic specialist. In my leisure time I’ve always enjoyed hiking and being out in nature. After my 20th birthday, I decided to trek alone for 25 days through the southern part of Iceland. It was on this trip that I discovered my passion for landscape photography and high dynamic range imaging using graduated filters. I returned to Switzerland with the enhanced experience of being able to capture the feeling of a landscape. At 21, I decided to turn my passion into my profession and put all of my resources into a world tour where I spent 5 intense months shooting 300-400 landscape images per day. It is through traveling that I have developed a well-trained eye for landscape photography. At the moment, I'm one of the youngest landscape photographers in the world. After my world tour my career started to progress quickly:

- 02.2009 Invitation by Calendaria (the largest calendar publisher in Switzerland) to become a member of their photographer team.
- 07.2009 A photo presentation tour throughout Switzerland of my slideshow: "Patagonia - Trekking through Paradise," viewed by 1400 visitors.
- 07.2009 Publication of my first international calendar (Blue Planet 2010) which sold over 600 copies.
- 02.2010 I foundet my own Photography School where more than 650 students are educated annually in basic and master courses.
- 04.2010 Expansion of my Photography School to include 15 different courses.
- 06.2010 I was inducted into the Professional Photography Association of Switzerland.
- 10.2010 My first guided photo excursion with 15 photography students to beautiful Engadin, Switzerland.
- 10.2010 Announcement of my first photo trekking trip to Iceland for 2011 (see brochure - German only).
- 11.2010 Announcement of my first photo excursion to the USA (see brochure - German only).
- 04.2011 Featured in 20minutes, the top national newspaper in Switzerland.
- 09.2011 I'm opening a new photography school in Bern, Switzerland
- 2011 Four different calendar projects will be published in collaboration with Calendaria.

The way I take photographs:
Many people have been asking whether my pictures were created by Photoshop or were directly taken by the camera. Well, it‘s simple. The majority of my pictures were taken by using GND (Graduated Neutral Density) filters. They allow photographers to reach an incredible dynamic range in their photographs (see picture to the right). Only the fine adjustments at the very end are made in Photoshop.


I can especially recommend the following places
ICELAND's Southern Highland; La Gomera, KANARY ISLANDS; Torres del Paine and Cerro Fitz Roy / Cerro Torre CHILE & ARGENTINIA; Southwestern USA; Westcoast SCOTLAND; Engadin Switzerland