The Annapurna Circuit is often considered one of the best treks on the planet – and to photographers, it’s an epic playground filled with jaw-dropping landscapes, vivid cultures, and light that changes so damn often, you are constantly whipping out your camera to capture the beauty around every corner. From its picturesque stone villages to snow-covered peaks and tree-lined gorges, the Annapurna region is an endless tensile of visual gems for photographers of all levels.
But the reverse Annapurna Round Trek is a whole other beast. You’re going to have to step back a bit, a bit before, and ready yourself more for beauty than logistics. And while each turn in the trail is one jaw-dropping photo moment after another, there are a few spots where you can have your camera — AMEN YOUR GLORY — out the whole time. This is how you can have a great time and enjoy your Annapurna trek as a photographer, and where and when you can take your best shots.
Timing the Light and the Trek
So there you are, a serious outdoor photographer, and it’s all about the light: It’s either too early, or it’s too late, or it’s too flat, or it’s too something else. The Annapurna Circuit also has some of the best light you could imagine — dappled sunlight at the start of a day, golden shafts of light piercing veils of cloud enshrouding valleys and the great white expanses of the afternoon, and eddying clouds lifted from white-capped hills. The best time to visit is during the dry months (October to November; March to April), when visibility is at its highest. You have the peak season because you have the clean air, nice sunrise, and are free from the hazy monsoon.
That’s the magic hours: It’s early mornings and late afternoons. Time your trekking to be somewhere high before dawn or in a village below a ridge in the evening. It’s not as interesting as the contrast and the shadow and the colors that are much more painterly than the midday sun.
Best Thru-Hiking Photo Spots: Best photo ops on the Trail. Some of the very first photo ops take place as you start to ascend beyond the verdant lowlands. The trail winds through terraced fields and a series of subtropical forested villages like Tal and Dharapani, before ascending into the lush, verdant green land cocooned in clouds and waterfalls in the approach to the pass. This part of the hike is all soft light and jungle textures, and makes for great environmental portraits and nature close-ups.
Annapurna Circuit Nepal If traveling from the east, the views of Annapurna II can be rather good in Upper Pisang. The village itself, perched high on the hillside with flapping prayer flags and mani walls (obelisks of stone slabs engraved with Buddhist scripture), is a work of cultural storytelling all its own. In the morning, the first light catches on the peaks and has a really beautiful glow to the valley–it has a really nice layered look and transitions well for wide/near shots.
Above Manang, you rise into an upper-alpine desert of vast panoramas and ginormous walls of rock. Elsewhere, there are moments here of greater, more dramatic momentum. The side hike up to Ice Lake may have you out of your way, but the perspective of the valley and the neighboring summits from above is an unparalleled bird’s-eye view, particularly at sunrise.
Tilicho Lake is one of the treasures for photographers. Cocooned with the aid of glaciers and desolate rocks, the lake’s blue-green waters felt out of place in this desert. Snapshots taken here in the morning or past due afternoon, whilst the wind dies down and the lake turns glassy, can often yield an eerie mirror image.
The Thorong La Pass. This is another one of those locations that are a gimme on the circuit, but given that it is the highest. It is accessible only with an early start, typically long before sunup. If the sky is clear, oh my goodness — it is some of the most epic stuff you are ever going to photograph of a morning light over the mountains. I love how the prayer flags and the top actually really grab the place, and that there’s something active in the foreground as well.
Capturing the Culture
The mountains may also steal the show, but the tradition in the back of the Annapurnas is every bit as photogenic. Buddhist prayer wheels, yak herders, antique ladies spinning wool, and monks treading highland paths are all pictures that tell the path’s deeper story. There are a lot of villages, somewhere in some place, there is a monastery that is 2 to 3 hundred years old or four couple of hundred years old. The look and feel of the monastery gives a very personal, sacred place to even shoot in.
If you’re going to photograph a subject, get his or her permission first. In iPhone and, that ghostly visitor is always with us — the photo to show the subject of a photo, one on one, after the picture was taken (smiling affectionately or nodding respectfully, or offering to show the photo on your phone can make the encounter feel human to all those involved). And in photographing real people in the act of doing real things, of going about their daily personal business, the grandeur of the mountains is infused with humanity.
Photography on the Trail: Gear to Take Along
You have to lose tens of kilos to go on a trek like this, of course, but if you really love photography, you always have to choose between gear and weight. You can shoot anything, using just about any DSLR or mirrorless camera and a wide-angle lens, and a midrange zoom. Otherwise, toting along a travel tripod, you may be nothing but a slavish basker in the sun, or by photos of the sunset, sunrise, and also the night sky. You’ll want spares: At least two portable battery packs (the cold and heat will suck your phone’s battery life faster than you’re used to at home, and you can’t trust the battery-charging situation at the teahouses – meh at best, sometimes paid).
Final Thoughts
Trekking the Annapurna Circuit Having said that, trekking the Annapurna Circuit is to me something that feels pretty special as a photographer, and while you will get a photo more postcard than not, you do have the chance to photography places on the planet that are essentially some of the most culturally diverse / geographically unique on the planet throughout the world. Every day, there was something new to see: some golden ridge, some clump of children jumping from a wooden bridge into a river, some fire-stormed sunrise the colour of a glacier.
The best pictures you’ll make on this hike aren’t only beautiful —they are stories. It’s not just a picture in every frame. You’re creating a memory: a visual diary of moments that wouldn’t exist unless you’d been there, just then, with your camera in your hand.
The Annapurna Circuit is that kind of trek, the eyes, the feet, and the heart — the eyes because the views of the mountains are so relentless — and for a photographer, it is pure, pure magic, all the way through.