Peaks perspective
- 📍 Location: Col du Lautaret, Hautes-Alpes, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
Higher up the same meadow, the lupines thin out among the rocks and the ridge opens onto the range. I framed upright with a large pale boulder in the near foreground, flowers around its base, and let the slope run away from it to the peaks.
The boulder is the hinge of the composition. It sits low and slightly right, close enough to the lens to be genuinely large, and it gives the eye a solid starting point before the picture climbs. Without it the foreground is only grass, and grass alone cannot hold the bottom of a vertical frame.
Haze had settled between the ridges and I kept it. Each successive line of rock is a little paler than the one in front, which is how depth appears in a photograph without any help from lighting: the oldest form of perspective there is, and the one the title is about.
The col is high enough that summer arrives late and leaves early, and everything in this frame (the flowers, the green, the bare rock warm enough to sit on) exists for about six weeks. That compression is part of why alpine meadows are so difficult to leave.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
