A Maasai warrior makes the high jump, in which athletes must touch a high line with the top of their heads, at the annual Maasai Olympics in the Sidai Oleng Wildlife Sanctuary near to Mt. Kilimanjaro, in southern Kenya, Saturday, December 13, 2014. Maasai men and women from the Amboseli and Tsavo region compete for medals and prizes in the event which aims for a sports competition of Maasai skills such as running, jumping, and throwing, to replace lion-hunting as the traditional warrior activity. (Photo by Ben Curtis/AP Photo)

A boy jumps into a pool of mud during the traditional “Bloco da Lama” or “Mud Street” carnival party, in Paraty, Brazil, Saturday, February 25, 2017. Legend has it the “bloco” was born in 1986 after local teens hiking in a nearby mangrove forest smeared themselves with mud to discourage mosquitoes and then wandered through Paraty. The party grew year after year, but revelers eventually were banned from parading in the colonial downtown after shopkeepers complained pristine white walls were stained with the hard-to-remove mud. (Photo by Mauro Pimentel/AP Photo)

A picture taken on August 25, 2021 shows a view of the Aletsch Glacier. After hiking for hours across the mountain and a vast expanse of white, Swiss glaciologist Matthias Huss crouches down near the middle of the massive glacier and checks the measurements. Analysis of the data gathered from Aletsch, the largest glacier in the Alps, paints a dire picture of the toll that climate change is taking on the behemoth. (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP Photo)

A woman holding a girl walks as police officers block the street during a rally called by the opposition leader Raila Odinga who claims the last Kenyan presidential election was stolen from him and blames the government for the hike of living costs in Kibera, Nairobi on March 27, 2023. Police fired tear gas to disperse anti-government protests on March 27, 2023 over the high cost of living, after the opposition vowed demonstrations would go ahead despite a police ban. (Photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP Photo)

Rescued Dutch hikers exit a search and rescue snowcat after they were brought safely to Grotli, Norway, February 26, 2016. Thirteen Dutchmen who were stranded while hiking in central Norway's mountains were found after snowmobile patrols by the Red Cross. Snowcats from the Red Cross are now moving ahead to pick the hikers up. (Photo by Torstein Boe/Reuters/NTB Scanpix)

We – Verena Popp-Hackner and Georg Popp - are professional landscape photographers. While we are based in Vienna/Austria, running our own (rights managed) image library and a small but fine photo-gallery. Photographing our tiny country Austria, with all it's culture and nature, canoeing it's rivers or lakes and hiking the Alps is our profession but our photographic “backyard” includes the rest of the planet as well. We use analog large format cameras almost exclusively for our landscape work, shooting on 4x5” sheet film, to provide clients with the maximum of print-sharpness and details and unsurpassed clarity and depth of focus.

Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, also known as Golden Rock is a well-known Buddhist pilgrimage site in Mon State, Burma. It is a small pagoda (7.3 metres (24 ft)) built on the top of a granite boulder covered with gold leaves pasted on by devotees. According to legend, the Golden Rock itself is precariously perched on a strand of the Buddha's hair. The balancing rock seems to defy gravity, as it perpetually appears to be on the verge of rolling down the hill. The rock and the pagoda are at the top of Mt. Kyaiktiyo. It is the third most important Buddhist pilgrimage site in Burma after the Shwedagon Pagoda and the Mahamuni Pagoda. A glimpse of the "gravity defying" Golden Rock is believed to be enough of an inspiration for any person to turn to Buddhism.