Daniel Forster: Wherever the wind

The old saying that in order to become famous in one’s own country it’s sometimes necessary to go somewhere else undoubtedly applies to Daniel Forster, a renowned yachting photographer from landlocked Switzerland. John McDermott talks to him about 35 years of capturing the drama of racing on the high seas.

Twenty years ago, the sailing specialist who grew up racing dinghies on a small lake near his hometown of Murten in Switzerland made the move to Newport, Rhode Island – the traditional home of the America’s Cup, yacht racing’s most prestigious event, and mecca of big-boat sailing. He felt compelled to emigrate because most of his clients were in the United States.
“The funny thing is,” says Forster, “my two biggest clients now are major Swiss companies - Rolex, which sponsors 26 of the world’s most important yacht races every year, and Union Bank of Switzerland, the principal sponsor of Alinghi, the two-time America’s Cup winner.” By any measure, Daniel Forster has not only achieved fame in his own country but is recognised worldwide as one of the very best at what he does.

© Daniel Forster

Alinghi during UBS Trophy, Newport, Rhode Island USA.

When young Daniel was competing in dinghy races on Lake Murten there was a senior member of his sailing club, a photographer named Tony Lutz, who had a studio in nearby Bern. Daniel began to take an interest in photography and Lutz encouraged him. Later, when it came time for Daniel to do an apprenticeship, he went to work for his mentor. “It was a great education,” he recalls. “Tony was mainly a still-life photographer and he shot everything on large format, processing all the film in-house. If you were half a degree off in temperature you could get a colour shift so I learned early on to be very precise, something that has always served me well.”

Daniel’s love of sailing inevitably led him to be more interested in photographing his favorite sport than in following in his mentor’s footsteps in the studio. He photographed his friends at the sailing club and sent prints of their regattas to the biggest Swiss sailing magazine, which began publishing his pictures on a regular basis.
“My first real break came in 1971,” says Daniel. “The editor liked what I was doing and asked me if I’d like to go to Kiel Week, in northern Germany, to shoot for the magazine. Kiel Week is a 100-year-old tradition and one of the biggest events on the European sailing calendar. The following year Kiel was the venue for the 1972 Olympic sailing events so I got to go back for what was to be the first of 10 Olympics that I’ve covered.”

© Daniel Forster

Olympic Games Athens 2004: Mistral men, a shot of Peter Wells, USA, using Daniel’s favourite lens, the EF600mm f/4L IS USM

These days Forster’s calendar is always full. He covers half of the 26 Rolex Series events scattered around the globe in places as diverse as the Virgin Islands, the Baltic Sea, Ireland, Tasmania and San Francisco Bay. According to Daniel, it is logistically impossible for one person to cover all of the Rolex Yachting Series events, so he divides that workload equally with an Italian colleague, Carlo Borlenghi. Even so, he hasn’t spent Christmas at home in Newport for the past seven years because the Rolex Sydney-to-Hobart race always starts on 26 December.

“To be a sailing photographer you really need to know how to sail,” insists Daniel. “You can easily get in someone’s way, or even get killed if you don’t know what’s going on. According to an old sailing saying, you should always keep one hand for the boat and one hand for yourself. As a photographer you really need a third hand for the camera.” He wears leather or rubber non-slip boat shoes or boots and, when necessary, he wraps an arm around the mast or a line, or a leg around a railing, so that he has both hands free for his camera. When the weather gets really rough he wears a harness and attaches himself to the boat with a secure safety line. “After thirty-seven years of doing this I just know what to do and what not to do. It’s happened to me that after a day at sea someone from the crew said ‘oh, you’re still on board!’. That’s the best compliment. It means I did my job without getting in anyone’s way.”

The physically demanding nature of Forster’s work can take its toll. “My toughest assignment was a 31-day crossing from Punta del Este in Uruguay, to Portsmouth in England on UBS Switzerland 1986 for the last leg of the Whitbread Round the World Race,” he explains. “I was hired as crew and only allowed to shoot between watches, which was normally when I was supposed to be sleeping. It was hot and miserable crossing the Equator, and cold and miserable finishing in early spring in England. We wore only bathing suits at the beginning, and five layers and boots at the finish.”

© Daniel Forster

Storm conditions for Cadenza in the Rolex Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race.

Daniel also recently had a serious back problem that is now fortunately under control, thanks to chiropractic treatments and a new routine of swimming, stretching and yoga. “I had gone a whole season without really doing any outside physical exercise. The stress of carrying all my gear through airports on my back and shoulders, and of working on moving boats and managing a 600mm lens from a helicopter, finally just broke me down.” Daniel has now redesigned his travel kit so that he only uses a pack and a computer bag which both have wheels, something he says makes an enormous difference to his back.

Forster has also occasionally had his problems with another, more common, problem: “I used to get seasick, usually when I showed up on the photo boat in the morning with a hangover or was tired from partying with the crews. I sometimes got seasick when it was too cold or too hot and humid in the cabin of the photo boat, or when there would be big swells and I would have to change lenses or look into my bag and lose sight of the horizon. But now, being older and leading a calmer life, I guess my body has finally learned to handle rocking boats and, I have to admit, I just don’t have many hangovers these days. But I still carry seasick pills just in case.”

Back in Newport, Daniel, not surprisingly, has his own boat. It’s a modest Laser, a one-man Olympic-class boat, not too different from the dinghies he began sailing on Lake Murten more than forty years ago.

Some of Daniel’s most dramatic images have been taken while seated in a tiny boatswain’s chair or a harness high above the deck, suspended by a rope from the top of the masts of various sailboats. It’s not a situation where there’s room for excess equipment. Forster’s solution: “Whenever I go up the mast I try to take two cameras, the EOS-1Ds Mark II, and the lighter, smaller EOS 5D, hanging them diagonally across my chest. I take two cameras, because how embarrassing would it be to be up an 80 foot mast and have to ask the crew to get you down and back up again because your battery ran out? I also always take two back-up CF cards, for the same reason. And having two cameras allows me to have two lenses, usually the EF17-35mm f/2.8L USM and the EF28-70mm f/2.8L USM.”

But the lens he really raves about is the EF400mm f/4 DO IS USM. “That lens is fantastic! To begin with it’s incredibly sharp, and the image stabilization works so well, which is very important to me since I’m always hand-holding it. Ninety per cent of the time I shoot with that lens on one camera body and the EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM on the other.”

Daniel spends a lot of time shooting from helicopters, especially at the week-long events he covers like the Sydney-Hobart and Fastnet races where he can spend as much as 18 hours shooting airborne over the course of a few days. He loves the mobility the aerial platform provides.

© Daniel Forster

Daniel up the mast during the Rolex Middle Sea race in Malta.

“A helicopter can cost as much in an hour as a motor boat does for a whole day. But it’s worth it because you are so much more manoeuvrable and can get so much more done. You can shoot straight down the mast from above to get the work on deck one minute and then drop down so low that you can shoot a boat partially hidden by a wave the next. We sometimes get so close to the water in the chopper that I’ve even had problems with salt spray.
“At the Olympics and the Americas Cup there are strict altitude restrictions, usually 700 feet, that you have to stay above the boats.” In this situation he uses the EF600mm f/4L IS USM. “It’s the sharpest lens I own and I love it, but it’s a bit heavy. I call it ‘the monster’, and it can get very tiring handling it for long periods in the helicopter.”

© Daniel Forster

Volvo Ocean Round the World Race winner, illbruck.

After decades shooting mostly transparency film, Forster embraced digital enthusiastically and is a big believer in shooting in RAW format. “The file quality is now as good or better than film, plus you suddenly got control of one more stage of the picture’s production,” he says with obvious pleasure. “Quite a few of my pictures have been saved by the flexibility RAW offers in processing because in the sailing environment you get can get exposures with deep shadows on sailor’s faces and white spray and bright highlights on the water, all at the same time. RAW really helps me to deal with those extremes.”