Most Popular Photos : December 2015 : Position 36

Every round the photography in this competition improves. Making it through to the last 10 gets ever harder, beautiful images need to be discarded and reasons found for each one, the slightest error leading to elimination. This round has been no exception. I think you will all agree that these top 10 landscape photographs are all outstanding images. Winning this theme is no small feat, you can be sure the competition will be steep, it takes sound techniques and sensitive composing, beautiful light and tones, crispy scenes and loads of imagination to master imagery like we see here. But it takes a little magic on top of all that mastery to stand alone, a step further up the ladder than anyone else. Well this photograph does just that, and there may well even be two steps. This is a brilliant, soulful, pure and spellbinding beauty. Congratulations.

Thank you for your thoughtful words, I appreciate it very much. The image was shot in a remote area on a high mountain plateau in Norway's west in the winter of 2015. After having scouted in the blue hours for a interesting foreground I was happy to find this particular curvy snow drift leading straight into where the sun would rise. I then waited until the moment just before the sun rose. At this moment in time the golden sky pretty much perfectly complimented the cool blues of the brittle snow surface. The tracks to the right are left behind by an arctic fox. I found them interesting on their own but I also was happy with how they helped balance out the otherwise a tad left-heavy scene. The image is made up of 9 vertical 16mm shots, although with a very big overlap in order for the closest foreground to stitch correctly (the camera was barely high enough off the ground to have everything in focus at the desired aperture). Thanks!