CHAMONIX
France, July 2017
The summer and autumn of 2017 was a period full of sports, outdoors, camping and mountains. I had discovered rock climbing and I totally fell in love with it. The fact that rock climbing gets me to the outdoors, right into nature, is not just a nice ‘side effect’ of this activity. It is actually one of the main reasons why I like it so much. The past years, and especially in 2017 / 2018, when my climbing obsession took a flight, it has taken me to some magnificent places.
Famous view from Aiguille du Midi
As I’m always carrying a camera in my hands, you can imagine that I have been taking quite some pictures up and around the mountains. The trip I took to Chamonix, France during the summer of 2017, was truly a one of kind.
I went to Chamonix with ‘LUAK’, the alpine club of the university of Leuven (Belgium). I had the opportunity to join a true alpine experience. Some more experienced alpinists offered to take a couple of less experienced alpinists (among them myself :) ) to join a glacier hike towards Tête Blanche (3429 m). It was truly an awesome, but also a very challenging and exhausting experience. I'll never forget the views, the landscape, the sunrise and the feeling to ‘have made it to the top’ though!
Unfortunately it’s not recommendable to carry a big camera around in these circumstances. Every single gram of extra weight to carry, is a gram too much… Therefore, I’m very glad to have made a couple of solo hikes through the high mountains of Chamonix. Going out, alone (with my camera) gives me the time I need to soak up the atmosphere of the environment around me and to discover the composition that captures the image I want to communicate. The pictures I took during ‘a one on one date with my camera’, turn out to be among the ones that satisfy me most.
Tip: Planning a ‘one on one date with your camera’ is a very interesting way to spend leisure time and ‘me’ time, maybe even if you didn't (yet) fall in love with photography 😉. Enjoy!
For my first hike, I took a cable car all the way to the famous 'Aiguille du Midi’ (3842 m). I don’t need to explain why this place is so popular. Witnessing the tiny alpinist crossing the vast stretches of snow and ice, the views and the dramatic nature of the landscape is just candy for the eyes...
View towards the highest viewpoint
Especially considering landscape photography, it’s sometimes very hard to capture the overwhelming beauty of a certain place. It seems like a picture makes the environment appear flat (which in fact happens if we take a picture… :) ) or you sometimes would like to fit the whole environment in the picture, but you never succeed...
One photography strategy is, to show your audience how big a certain landscape, building, or any other object in a picture is, to include a shape of a familiar size in the picture. Including people in landscape picture is always a good idea! Most of the times the people are so small, that they aren’t the main subject in the picture. They just help the spectator to imagine the size of the environment depicted in the photo.
Another interesting way to think about this ‘photography problem’, it to realize that (most of the times) the audience doesn’t even know what the rest of the environment - outside - of your picture looked like. They don’t have a clue about which elements you left out of the picture, they only get to see the product of what you chose to be in the frame! This approach gives in fact a lot of power to the photographer. You and your creativity decide what gets to be in and out of the picture!
Spot the tiny people in this picture (left) and try to imagine the true scale of this landscape!
View from the mid-station of the Aiguille du Midi cable car
Lac Bleu
Reflection in the water of Lac Bleu
Panoramic view of Mont Blanc, Europe's highest peak
The second hike took place on the west side of Chamonix. I took a cable car to the ‘Planpraz’ station and from there, I hiked all the way to Lac Cornu and Lac Noir, and from Col de la Glière to the cable car station ‘L’index’. I was actually the last person to take the cable car down, back to the valley!
It was a very well spend day. The landscape kept surprising me over and over again. Snow and ice, interspersed with colourful rocks, green vegetation and flowers… At Lac Noir, I was even all alone. I had a delicious lunch, took the sun and spent quite some time taking the pictures I wanted to take…
View from the Planpraz cable car station.
If you take a close look, you'll notice it's a picture of the same mountains as the picture above.
Can you also spot the paraglider?
Lac Cornu
Lac Noir
View from Col de La Glière
I spent the third hiking day a bit north of Chamonix. Although the views were again outstanding, this hike showed me also a sad side. A couple of the once great glaciers of this area (among them the ‘La Mer de Glace’ and the ‘Glacièr de Argentière’), are retreating with an immense pace. The glaciers that used to stretch out over several kilometres, are just a mere shadow of what they have been in the past…
I hope my pictures can inspire you to go and visit the beautiful Chamonix yourself. I would highly recommend it.
It’s a paradise for everyone that loves mountains and nature.
Just realize that the beauty of Chamonix can be gone, soon. To keep enjoying areas like these in the way we like to see them - snowy, icy and rough -, we have to make that change… together!
The impressive Aiguille du Dru
The sad view of the retreating Glacièr de Argentière
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