On Alpine Glow

The pink on the snowfields at dusk — what the Germans call alpenglühen — is the longest-traveled light most of us are ever going to see. The sun has already set where you are standing; what is reaching the peaks above you has bent through more atmosphere than any other light of the day. It is filtered, exhausted, and somehow patient. It is also, almost always, photographed badly.

Three failures recur. The first is saturation: the temptation to push the pink until it becomes a color that does not exist in nature. The second is contrast: the photograph wants to be high-key, and you keep printing it low. The third is composition: the peak is so beautiful that you forget to give it any companions in the frame, and the result reads as a postcard rather than a photograph.

The discipline is to underexpose by a third, to let the lower world go nearly black, and to give the peak the dignity of being one element among several. Old Mt. Sopris from the south is a fair teacher.