Dolomites, Northern Italy. 07:38am. 21 October 2021
In the first of a new series of travel photography tales, Canon pro and PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine columnist David Clapp reveals how a Fall photoshoot in the Dolomites was the day that didn’t stop giving!
"The Dolomites are badass. The mountains are just so spiky and aggressive, and to this day, I’ve photographed nothing like them. It’s difficult to imagine they were once a coral reef and, in basic geological terms, two plates (African and European) that pushed towards each other, lifting and creating photogenic folds that plaster daily Instagram feeds.
It was autumn, and I’d gone there for a recce with my good friend Martin, to see what the season’s colors were all about. The woodland was a mix of deciduous trees, with larch (a deciduous conifer) covering the mountain slopes. The air was fresh, the weather was stable, and it was a relief to be away, camera in hand.
We centered our stay in two zones: the Val Gardena region and Cortina. The trees hadn’t fully turned in Gardena, but traveling to Cortina, the larches had turned beautifully, and driving through the mountain passes, washed with rich yellow, was an unforgettable experience.
I had my Canon 5D Mk IV welded to my Canon EF 100-400mm f/4-5.6L II and it sat on the floor by the back seats. I always have a polarizer on the front of it. The wonderful thing about mountains is that you can literally keep shooting all day.
As the sun rises, you shoot pre-dawn and then dawn light. When the sun climbs, the light rakes down through the slopes, creating amazing back-lighting effects in the autumnal trees. Polarized blue skies make guide-book-style lunchtime shooting very effective. Then you reverse the order.
Mid-week, we started early at Lago Di Misurina. It was a beautiful calm morning and our view looked southwards across a mirrored lake to a beautiful set of side-lit mountains. I was so glad we arrived early, but not because we avoided other tourists. Within minutes of taking my first blue-hour shots of this delightful alpine view, a flock of ducks splash-landed in the middle of the lake. Their noisy objective was to ruin any chance of repeating my low-light reflections with morning light."
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"We journeyed into the mountains, shot another lake and I hovered around the edge of a workshop group, curious as to why they thought the location was any good. Onwards, and we shot spectacular back light in the deciduous trees. The EF 100-400mm gave all manner of fabulous long-lens details as I focused deep into the larches. Everything is easier handheld, so I upped the ISO to 400 and shot deep into the light."
"Later that afternoon, the temperature dropped and a cloud inversion began to appear in the distant valleys beneath. The sky gestured that there could be breaks, but this was mountain weather and anything could happen.
Cloud rolled over us, the breaks were minimal, but the fog pushed up from the valley beneath like a rising tide. A convection stream caused the impossible – mist was flowing uphill! It pushed over the hillside beneath and there I isolated a small barn at 200mm, just before it seemed to sink underwater.
The sunset was rather weak but the conditions built and built. The mountain to our right looked beautiful in the blue light, a mountain lodge companion sitting at its base. I shot using my Canon EF 24-70mm f/4L IS and the EF 100-400mm in tandem until I could see no more.
Just as we thought it was all over, a full moon rose behind a distant range and my mind blew. It was really was the day that didn’t stop giving."
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