Shooting at altitude: capturing the action while keeping pace with elite athletes

He’s a photographer, videographer and social media creator who can keep up with athletes in the mountains in the most extreme situations. For Maximilian Gierl fast process speeds aren’t just nice to have – they’re essential for a good night’s recovery.

Max Gierl is a true Swiss army knife when it comes to capturing those moments in the mountains that may only last a fraction of a second. He takes no chances and is usually armed with a DSLR, cell phone, an Insta360 and a drone to ensure he covers every angle.  
 
Uniquely he’s a mountain athlete himself and is able to keep up with athletes when they’re in full race mode both on the trails and on the peaks. During the recent Red Bull X-Alps adventure race, he had the job of filming the leading group of athletes as they ran almost 1,000m of vertical from the race start in Kitzbühel to the top of the Hahnenkamm, the famous ski run. Amazingly, Max kept pace with the lead athletes the whole way, leading him to be known as “Mad Max – the mountain goat”. “It was pretty tough,” he laughs.  
 
And that was just the start – for 12 days he was hiking up with athletes and shooting them on the move. And since the race is a near-live experience for the global audience who follow online – that means being equally fast when it comes to delivering stills and footage. 
 
“In these kind of race environments and situations speed matters,” Max says. “It’s very important to get stuff out as fast as possible to make it as live as possible. That’s my job.”

“I also use the super fast Angelbird cards directly in my DSLR and drone, meaning I can shoot in super high resolution. These were intense days with not so much sleep. We were really well equipped with this tough gear. Angelbird media is built to last so if I were to drop the CFexpress I could be confident that my files were not gone.” 
 
What makes the Angelbird products really stand out – apart from their rugged design – is the speed, he adds. “It takes about 30 to 40 seconds to download 400-500 images and videos. It’s super quick.”

To be successful in this job as a race photographer and filmer, he says it all comes down to being in the right place at the right time. “You have to choose the right gear to be in the mountains such as your clothes and equipment. But the other thing is the camera, laptop – and storage media. That’s really important, especially when you’re in some wild places and need your workflow to be as fast as possible.” 
 
During the race Max’s day would typically begin at 03:30am to get ready to hike up a mountain with an athlete when they started to move at 04:00am. He estimates that he hiked nearly 10,000m of vertical during the race. For the climb he would typically be equipped with the minimum of equipment to keep the weight down. That would mean just his DSLR, drone, Insta360, phone and backup Angelbird storage devices. He says his backpack would typically be 90% camera equipment and 10% clothes and water. 
 
He explains that after flying the drone he would immediately swap out the Angelbird microSD memory card.  “After every flight it’s always important to switch cards because if you lose the footage of the flights from before you’re not going to be happy! So I always change to a new card, a big one like the 512 GB – then you’re safe so nothing can happen.”  
 
During the race he and the other filmers experienced some extreme conditions. This included a dramatic thunder and lightning storm on day one in the Dolomites of northern Italy.

Red Bull X-Alps, the world’s toughest adventure race, is a unique competition where athletes have 12 days to cover a 1,283km course around the Alps with their only means of travel being hiking or flying under their lightweight wings.  
 
The first day began in Austria with good weather and athletes crossed the main chain of the Alps to Sexten, Italy. But then all hell broke loose with a massive thunderstorm that tore through the Dolomites, just as athletes attempted to complete a mandatory Via Ferrata climb, recalls Max. 
 
“It was definitely a day for Angelbird gear,” Max laughs. In the end, organizers halted the climb and athletes took shelter next to a mountain hut and in caves. But while athletes could wait out the storm, for Max there was no rest. As hail battered down on the roof, he got to work, recording interviews with athletes and uploading footage from earlier in the day – all while the rain and hail came down outside.  
 
“It was a wild weather day for sure,” he says. “It was wet, humid and cold so you really had to watch out for the condensation. Fortunately, I had no problems.” He adds: “After a few days I’d shot quite a lot of stuff. We had intense and beautiful moments. And thanks to these amazing memory cards and Solid State Drives we were able to deliver our content as fast as possible so audiences could watch the action as if it were almost live.”

“It’s an incredibly high pace race and that also needs high pace gear so it’s a perfect match to use Angelbird products,” he adds. “Slow gear means less time to recover. We were only getting four hours of sleep a night so being as quick as possible transferring data helped to give us longer to recharge our batteries.” 
 
Still, it was one of the toughest assignments that Max has recently worked on. “It was pretty crazy even by my standards and I was totally exhausted afterwards. But I also captured some incredible images and footage that I’m really proud of, and thanks to Angelbird, I had total confidence these files were safe and secure during the often hazardous journey to the laptop and the backup process.”