Photographing mountains: what actually makes a difference

Everybody possesses this photograph. You're standing before something colossal, you raise the camera, and the result is a flat, diminutive strip of grey rock beneath a featureless white sky. Mountains resist photography for the very reason they're worth photographing: their scale overwhelms the frame. What follows is a collection of beneficial habits, arranged in descending order of their influence on the finished image.

#Light outranks equipment

The identical ridge at noon and at sunrise produces two unrelated photographs. Midday sunshine at altitude arrives harsh and vertical, flattening every slope and extracting colour from the sky.

During golden hour, the first and final hour of direct sunlight, illumination rakes sideways across the terrain and hands every ridge its own shadow, which is where the sense of depth originates. Alpenglow, the rose and amber light that touches the highest summits in the minutes after sunset or before sunrise, arrives once the valley has already surrendered to shadow and lasts a handful of minutes, so be positioned before it begins. Blue hour, after the sun disappears below the horizon, flatters villages whose windows glow beneath darkening mountains.

All of this entails navigating in darkness by headlamp, an admission price that justifies every forfeited hour of sleep.

#Unfavourable weather is favourable weather

A cloudless blue sky is the most monotonous sky imaginable. Clouds contribute structure, fog pooling in valleys separates ridges into distinct layers, and sunlight breaking through after a storm may become the most dramatic spectacle of the entire expedition. Never abandon a photographic excursion on the strength of a forecast predicting overcast conditions. Respect thunderstorms, though: no photograph justifies standing on an exposed ridge with lightning approaching.

#Reveal the scale

A mountain photographed without any reference point possesses no measurable dimensions whatsoever. Include something whose dimensions the viewer already understands. A distant hiker positioned in a corner of the frame communicates magnitude at a glance, as does a tent, a shepherd's hut, a medieval tower or a winding road. Animals perform the same service: a flock of sheep scattered across a hillside transforms that hillside into something immense.

#Reach for the telephoto

Instinct insists on the widest possible lens, the better to "capture everything". An ultra-wide lens pushes every element into the distance and shrinks magnificent peaks into insignificant bumps. Experiment with a telephoto lens, something around 70 to 200 millimetres. Long focal lengths compress distance, stack successive ridgelines into layered silhouettes, and let a remote summit tower over the village standing in front of it. Some of the most memorable mountain photographs are fragments: a single illuminated peak, one sculpted line of ridge.

When you do choose a wide lens, anchor the composition with a strong foreground, such as boulders, wildflowers, a stream or a path leading inward, so the viewer's eye has somewhere to begin travelling.

#Protect the highlights

Snow and sky are luminous, and shadowed valleys are dark, and a camera sensor can rarely accommodate both extremes simultaneously. Shoot RAW, which preserves far more recoverable information. Consult the histogram instead of trusting the screen; a histogram clipped against its right edge means the snowfield has become a blank white shape with no texture remaining. For extreme contrast, bracket three exposures and combine them during post-processing.

A polarising filter deepens blue skies and suppresses haze, along with reflections on water and wet rock. Combined with ultra-wide lenses, it can darken one portion of the sky far more than the remainder, so rotate it and evaluate the consequences before committing.

#Cold, batteries and condensation

Low temperatures drain batteries with alarming speed. Keep replacements inside an interior pocket against your body and alternate them at intervals. Carrying a frozen camera straight into a heated guesthouse coats the lens, and the camera's interior, with condensation; seal the camera inside a bag before stepping indoors and allow its temperature to equalise. Gloves with fold-back fingertips eliminate an extraordinary amount of frustration.

#Carry less, walk further

The most sophisticated equipment accomplishes nothing if it remains in the vehicle. One camera body and two lenses, a wide-angle and a telephoto, handle almost every situation the mountains present. The additional kilometre a lighter backpack permits will yield a better photograph, more often than not, than the additional lens would have.

#Respect the people and their places

Mountain villages aren't decorative scenery arranged for visitors. Request permission before photographing residents at close range, don't fly a drone over somebody's courtyard, and stay on established paths through hay meadows, which represent somebody's winter fodder.

The photograph heading this article lives in the gallery alongside its companions.