Cold Light https://clickonthemountain.com/ Mountain and ski photography - the ground, the light, and the record. en Click on the Mountain, 2009–2018: The Record of Ten Editions Under Monte Bianco https://clickonthemountain.com/courmayeur/pg8 https://clickonthemountain.com/courmayeur/pg8 Ten editions reconstructed year by year from the contest's own archived pages and the press that covered it — five teams in the first year and four thereafter, a book that fell from thirty photographs to five and climbed back to ten, and a tenth edition after which nothing further was published. Four Teams, Three Days, One Book: What Click on the Mountain Was and How It Worked https://clickonthemountain.com/courmayeur/click-on-the-mountain-en-10 https://clickonthemountain.com/courmayeur/click-on-the-mountain-en-10 A ski school in Courmayeur invented a contest with one governing rule — that nothing about the route could be decided in advance — and then spent ten winters building an apparatus of guides, helicopters and deadlines around it. Standing in the Fall Line: Where a Photographer Can Legally and Safely Work on a Snow Slope https://clickonthemountain.com/courmayeur/click-on-the-mountain-join-the-event-582 https://clickonthemountain.com/courmayeur/click-on-the-mountain-join-the-event-582 Click on the Mountain ran its tenth and final edition in March 2018, is not running, and cannot be taken part in — and this page, which organises nothing and sells nothing, sets out instead what the FIS Code of Conduct, Italy's D.Lgs. 40/2021 and the Swiss avalanche record oblige of a person who has stopped on a snow slope, is facing uphill, and cannot be seen over a convex roll. Belluscio, Giordan, Bellini: The 2011 Public Vote, and the Juries That Replaced It https://clickonthemountain.com/index.php https://clickonthemountain.com/index.php The Internet Archive holds four identical captures of the 2011 homepage, and on each sits a public leaderboard reading Belluscio, Giordan, Bellini — set here against the published rules of the juries that decide mountain photography now. The Meter Is Not Broken: Metering Snow When the Subject Lasts a Second and a Half https://clickonthemountain.com/exposure/the-meter-is-not-broken-metering-snow-for-a-moving-rider https://clickonthemountain.com/exposure/the-meter-is-not-broken-metering-snow-for-a-moving-rider Reflected-light meters do exactly what ISO 2720 and ISO 12232 specify, which is why a snowfield comes back grey — and why the correction is not one number but a range that runs from about +0.3 EV to about +2.2 EV before the light has changed at all. No Shade on a South Face: Alpine Contrast, and the Two Colour Temperatures of a Single Slope https://clickonthemountain.com/exposure/no-shade-on-a-south-face-alpine-contrast-and-two-white-balances https://clickonthemountain.com/exposure/no-shade-on-a-south-face-alpine-contrast-and-two-white-balances Computes where the sun actually stands above Courmayeur in early March, and shows why one white balance cannot serve snow lit by a 5200 K sun and snow lit by 9000 K sky in the same frame. When the Mountain Disappears: Flat Light in Val Veny, and the Treeline That Saves the Frame https://clickonthemountain.com/exposure/flat-light-in-val-veny-and-the-treeline-that-saves-the-frame https://clickonthemountain.com/exposure/flat-light-in-val-veny-and-the-treeline-that-saves-the-frame The commonest condition in the Alps and the least written about — cloud reduces the sky to one azimuthally uniform source, the shading gradient that described the slope stops existing, and what a camera has left to hold is a tree. A Cold Battery Is Not a Dead Battery: Lithium-Ion, Dew Point, and Camera Failure Below Freezing https://clickonthemountain.com/cold/a-cold-battery-is-not-a-dead-battery https://clickonthemountain.com/cold/a-cold-battery-is-not-a-dead-battery A cold lithium-ion cell reports empty under load and recovers in a pocket — Nikon's own reference guide states that "once warmed, cold batteries may recover some of their charge" — and the same misread temperature runs through the plastic-bag ritual, the snow on the body, and the word weather-sealed. Distance Decides the Lens: Why a Forty-Degree Face Reads Flat at 200mm https://clickonthemountain.com/the-slope/distance-decides-the-lens-focal-length-and-terrain https://clickonthemountain.com/the-slope/distance-decides-the-lens-focal-length-and-terrain Works the angular arithmetic of a forty-degree face and finds that the terrain sets the subject distance, the focal length follows from it, and the same slope photographed twenty degrees off the fall line draws at sixteen degrees. Cresta d’Arp to Punta Helbronner: The Ground Click on the Mountain Actually Used https://clickonthemountain.com/ground/cresta-darp-to-punta-helbronner-the-terrain-the-contest-used https://clickonthemountain.com/ground/cresta-darp-to-punta-helbronner-the-terrain-the-contest-used Sector by sector across the ground ten editions worked — altitude, aspect, the hour the light arrives, and what the institutional record says about the hazards. Not a route guide. Why It Was Always March: Sun Angle, Snowpack, and the Narrow Window Courmayeur Gives https://clickonthemountain.com/ground/why-it-was-always-march-the-courmayeur-season-window https://clickonthemountain.com/ground/why-it-was-always-march-the-courmayeur-season-window Eight of the ten editions carry a date, six of them fall inside sixteen days of calendar, and the reason is computable — at 45.79° N a forty-degree north-facing face gets no direct sun at solar noon until 10 March. Reading the Frame: Vittorio Sella’s Alpine Plates, and the Oldest Problem in Snow Photography https://clickonthemountain.com/reading-the-frame/vittorio-sella-and-the-problem-of-snow-detail https://clickonthemountain.com/reading-the-frame/vittorio-sella-and-the-problem-of-snow-detail Sella carried large-format plates across the Alps, the Caucasus and the Karakoram, and met the identical exposure problem — with an emulsion far more sensitive to blue than to red and no meter at all.