Michael Wilkins
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Warm-toned photograph of an alpine valley from above, heavy cloud breaking to let a shaft of sun onto the snow-covered slopes, the far range dissolving into gold haze.

The Break

Verbier, Switzerland · January 2020

iPhone 11 Pro Max, 4 millimetres, f 1.8, 1/19000 of a second, ISO 40

Two minutes of sun through a day of cloud, and it landed in the right place.

Cloud had been sitting on the whole valley since morning and then broke for about two minutes in the middle of the afternoon, dropping one shaft onto the slope opposite. Warm-graded because that is genuinely how it looked — the light coming through that gap was orange against snow that had been blue-grey all day. You do not plan for this; you just have to still be outside when it happens.

Part of The Alps in Winter, a series.