Method
Who publishes this, what it is not, and where every fact comes from.
What this is
Cold Light is an independent publication about photographing snow, alpine light and mountain terrain. It publishes at clickonthemountain.com, an address that belonged to something else first, and that history is the reason this page exists.
What this is not
The Courmayeur Ski and Snowboard School founded the contest in 2009. That school is an organisation that exists independently of this website and has no involvement in it. Nothing published here should be read as coming from that school, from the contest's organisers, or from anyone who competed.
The domain lapsed after the contest stopped publishing, was briefly used by others for unrelated purposes, and is now used for this. That is the whole of the connection.
Why publish here at all
Because the record was disappearing. Ten editions of a contest that drew working photographers to one valley produced a decade of results, rosters and format changes that existed only on a website that no longer resolved. The press that covered it is scattered across four languages and several dead links. Reassembling that from the archive and the published coverage is a genuinely useful thing to do, and it is the one subject this address is uniquely placed to carry.
The rest of the publication follows from the same place: if the interesting question is how you photograph a rider on a bright, steep, cold mountain, then metering, contrast, cold-weather equipment behaviour, terrain and position are the subjects worth writing about carefully.
How this is written
Nothing here is written from personal experience. No article on this site is a first-hand account of skiing Courmayeur, shooting the contest, or testing equipment on a glacier. Every article is written as researched reference, in the third person. Where a first-person sentence appears, it is inside quotation marks with a name attached to it.
That constraint decides what may be published:
- Technique is admissible only when it follows from physics, optics or published specification, or when it is attributed to a named working photographer in a cited, published interview.
- Numbers are given as ranges with the condition that moves them, never as commandments. "Add two stops" is a claim to be examined, not repeated.
- Anything touching avalanche terrain, glacier travel or backcountry access names its institution in the sentence — AINEVA, Fondazione Montagna Sicura, the Società delle Guide Alpine di Courmayeur — or it is not asserted at all. Where the published record is silent, the article says the record is silent instead of guessing. Nothing here is a substitute for a current bulletin, local knowledge or a qualified guide.
- Where sources conflict, both are named and the disagreement is left visible rather than quietly resolved.
Images
The photographs made at Click on the Mountain belong to the photographers who made them. Where a winning frame is still published by its author or its original outlet, it is described in words and linked with credit.
This publication has no photographs of its own, and says so plainly. Its illustrations are generated images and drawn diagrams, labelled as such in the caption, in the alt text and in the file name. An illustration here explains an argument; it never documents an event, and it is never presented as evidence that something happened.
Corrections
Mistakes get fixed in the open, dated, with what changed. The log is at /corrections/. The people index at /index/people/ is the page most likely to contain errors — names recorded second-hand in four languages — and corrections to it are especially welcome.
Contact
Corrections, additions to the record, and anything a participant wants to set straight: /contact/.