by Emma Pigott
I’m the first to admit that I live in a beautiful place. Guests often ask if we ever tire of our view and the answer is always, no. How could we? It might be the same mountains day after day but rarely do they look the same and every now and then they have the ability to show you a new side, something you’ve never seen before.
I do take hundreds of photos, usually first thing in the morning, but they mostly end up somewhere on a hard drive. Those photos that draw me back time and again, are the ones where the mountain surprises me. In my photography I try to look beyond the photogenic, to find a perspective and an emotion within the landscape that I can share with the viewer. They are photos that require time to view. At first glance the familiar sites are obscured by clouds, the mood is dark, the emotion intense; these are not always the postcard shot. I like to hope that they draw you back though, just as they draw me back.
Slice of Light is from my “Dark Moods” series. The Dents du Midi peeks through the storm clouds, newly draped in snow. Beyond the storm the sky is blue and the sun is shining. The sunlight picks out the peaks in a soft pink light but the lowers slopes are in the dark blue of the cloud.
I chose to frame it vertically as a portrait of the mountain and to highlight the scale of my subject. In the digital darkroom, I could have taken the colours one of two ways: make the clouds white or the snow on the mountain. One of the things that fascinates and amazes me still when I see it is how blue the light is under the clouds. When you learn about colours of light in photography you are told that cloudy days seem ‘bluer’ in terms of the light filtered through the clouds. Living in the mountains you can see the blue as the clouds sit on different parts of the mountain. Slice of Light celebrates this intense blueness of the cloud, becoming monochromatic as the mountain sinks down into the storm. The viewer looks out from the storm to the promise of a beautiful day. It’s not something you can see everyday but if you know what to look for, the mountain can surprise you.
