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Rangefinder Magazine
March 2004

Sinar 2004 Calendar: by John Rettie
Top of Switzerland

Each year hundreds of companies produce calendars for clients. A few become famous. Some, such as the Pirelli calendar, even become status symbols and take on lives of their own.

A helicopter was needed to lift the Rinspeed Advantige Rone up to the ski platform for the elaborate shoot.

Every year at the Geneva auto show, Rinspeed displays an outrageous concept car that Frank Rinderknecht, the company’s founder, has created to draw publicity for the Swiss company’s range of modified high-performance cars and parts.

Sinar, the Swiss camera manufacturer, realizes the value in producing a calendar likely to adorn walls and bring publicity to the company’s range of cameras.

What better than a joint venture calendar from these two Swiss icons?

In order to demonstrate the ability of Sinar’s 22.2-megapixel Sinarback 54 camera back, the company wanted a series of pictures with incredible detail that would elicit a collective “Wow” from those studying the images closely. Enter Swiss photographers Luca Zanier (www.zanier.ch) and Markus Weber (www.weberfoto.ch).

Sinar’s 2004 calendar features a scene shot on Schilthorn “Piz Gloria,” the Swiss ski platform featured in the James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Over a period of several months they scouted locations to create fanciful scenes that would remind viewers of Swiss icons. Each of the six images in the “Top of Switzerland” calendar incorporates one of Rinspeed’s unique concept show cars from the past six years in incongruous locations. They were all taken with the Sinarback 54 and either a medium format camera or Sinar’s p3 view camera.

Take a look at each image, and you’ll quickly realize just how much work was involved in creating the “sets.” For the January/February page a helicopter had to transport a car up to a ski platform high up in the Alps (a James Bond location). A crane placed a Rinspeed E-Go Rocket on the famous Zytglogge clock tower in Berne for the May/June page. Imagine the work involved in getting permission from all the parties involved in each of these scenes.

The end result of all this effort is a large 20x40-inch calendar, with a single intriguing photograph for every two months of 2004.

The photographer required a cherry picker in order to photograph the Rinspeed E-Go Rocket as it dangled in front of Berne’s famous clock tower.	Who’d think of dangling a concept car from a crane in front of the famous 16th century astronomical clock in Berne, Switzerland, for a calendar?

If you’re not lucky enough to be on Sinar’s mailing list for one of these “Top of Switzerland” calendars, you can always purchase one from Sinar or Rinspeed. You can even download smaller copies of each image from either company’s web site. If you want to see pictures of more of Rinspeed’s exotic and unusual concept cars, visit www.rinspeed.com. Also check out Sinar’s web site at www.sinar.ch for more images and technical details on the creation of a truly extravagant calendar. Oh, and it does demonstrate that a 22-megapixel digital camera back can produce a large image with plenty of detail to make it worthy of staying on the wall well past the end of 2004.

John Rettie is a photojournalist who resides in Santa Barbara, CA. Readers can contact him by e-mail at john@johnrettie.com or by snail-mail c/o Rangefinder.