Michael Wilkins
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Black and white photograph of a long jagged mountain range standing above a level sea of cloud filling the valley below, dark pine-covered slopes just breaking through the white.

Above the Inversion

Verbier, Switzerland · December 2019

1D X Mark II, 85 millimetres, f 11, 1/125 of a second, ISO 100

The valley had fog all day. Up here it was the ceiling.

A temperature inversion — cold air trapped in the valley under warm air above, so the cloud sits as a flat white lid and everything above it is in clear sun. From below it was a grey, miserable day. Black and white because the scene had already reduced itself to two tones and adding a blue sky back in would have made it a postcard.

Part of The Alps in Winter, a series.