Vicino Campitello, Val di Fassa, Dolomiti, Italia
Fujifilm X-T3, XF55-200mmF3.5-4.8 R LM OIS, f10 @ 1/1700 second, ISO 160

Skiing gives you great access to the mountains. Unfortunately (but only in some ways), skiing starts and ends when the sun is quite high in the heavens. The slopes have to be made safe in the morning and they close early enough to allow for any complications that may have happened with the sliding public – it’s very hard to find lost souls in the dark. So, if you’re looking for alpine sunrises and sunsets, you’ll be photographing them from your accommodation or perhaps on well-timed drives out on the roads.

However, what makes sunrise and sunset so special? Let’s ignore the colour. In any event, the actual sunrise or sunset is usually of less interest than some other part of the landscape taking full advantage of the angled side lighting. Early and late in the day benefit from the angle of the light, but generally we’re assuming the landscape itself is flat.

But what happens when we tilt the landscape 45 degrees upwards? Or maybe 90 degrees? Suddenly we can choose almost any time of the day to capture a landscape that is effectively side lit. The photo above was taken just before noon, hardly early morning or late afternoon. Of course, in winter the sun doesn’t get that high in the sky, so there’s an immediate advantage with the seaon, but the point I’m labouring is that if you’re prepared to play around with your exposure and look around for the light, there’s always something to be found in the mountains.

I guess you’d call this top lighting, or top back lighting because the light is coming through the clouds from behind. It is the combination of silhouetted mountains with sunlit clouds that creates the interest. Originally a colour capture, the image was converted into black and white and the blue and cyan channels darkened to create the drama in the sky. Exposure was reduced which has two benefits: it retains some tone and shape in the clouds, plus it creates more drama.

You can see a series of images taken a few years back using this and similar techniques on my personal website - www.petereastway.com.

When travelling, we don’t always have a choice of the time we visit a location. It’s nice if we can spend a day or a week exploring, but if yours is a brief sojourn to the mountains, it may just be a matter of approaching the subject a little differently.

Tony Hewitt and I will be taking a photo tour to Italy in October this year and we'll be visiting some mountains very close to this one. Come along - details can be found here.