Photographs – Living for Light

Breithorn – Valais

I was in Zermatt in Switzerland a couple of times last year. It’s a lovely part of the world and there are a lot of things to do and see there. The highest profile mountain in the area is, of course, the Matterhorn, star of Toblerone wrappers amongst other things.

Brussels to Zermatt is about 8 hours, depending on how much time you want to waste in Geneva. I usually have a run into the city and target arriving in Zermatt in time for dinner. I’ve generally arrived too late for Apfelstrudel from Fuchs Bakery. The train journey from Geneva to Zermatt is one of the most beautiful train journeys I have done more than once. It’s an InterCity to Brig – with a change in Visp onto the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn. The journey to Visp, with Swiss Railways is mostly along the banks of Lake Geneva, and it is gorgeous. At the northern end of the lake, the mountains on the eastern side rise like cliffs. The lake is a gorgeous colour and then, outside Montreux, you have the Chateau de Chillon. The south eastern end of Switzerland is a truly beautiful area.

From Visp to Zermatt, you take the mountain railway. In parts, it is rack and pin, and quite steep. The carriages have big windows and the views are gorgeous. There are a few reliable waterfalls too. Whether you do the train in winter or summer it is very picturesque. It’s a 3 or 4 hour journey from Geneva but I have never been bored on it. The journey is just that beautiful.

Most times that I go to Zermatt, I take the cable cars up to either Trockener Steg or Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, or possibly also, Gornergrat. There are a few places I haven’t tried yet. Matterhorn Glacier Paradise is at the top of Klein Matterhorn and it has a great view, sometimes, of two terrific mountains, the Matterhorn itself, if it’s not buried in clouds, and the Breithorn, a mountain which suffers a little in fame limited by the Matterhorn’s imposing presence.

I love both of them. I paint both of them from time to time when the fit takes me and yesterday, I did a credit card painting of the Breithorn. A creditcardsketch is where you fit everything into a window the size of a creditcard. Instagram has a hashtag. I based it off one of the photographs I took there myself last year. You can see it her.

Ice Macro

This is one of my favourite photographs which I took. I had just bought a 100mm macro lens for my DSLR, a Canon 40D and I wanted to play with it. So I went looking for stuff, and it was a cold, cold evening.

I used to take a lot of photographs. It’s not yet obvious here but for a while, if you wanted kitesurfing photographs in Dublin, well I took them. I took photographs of kitesurfers in Australia, in Portugal, in Brazil, in Spain, in Western Sahara and in Dublin. I stopped around 2014. There were a couple of reasons, of which probably the main ones were:

My back was hurting from the camera bag. It weighed about 20kg on average, and I carried it everywhere.
Drones were coming on stream. I didn’t have the money to buy one, nor the patience to learn to fly one
In around 2014, I had pretty much achieved every photograph I wanted to do. There was no real challenge left unless I went to video or drone shots. Both would have required money which I didn’t have.

Not long afterwards, I started learning to draw and for a few years, most of the photographs I took, I took with a phone. It’s still the case today that most of the photos I take are with a phone, but at some point, after wrestling seriously with a JPG and Photoshop, I went into Saturn in Luxembourg to find a compact camera that I could keep in my handbag, but which had the capabilities of RAW photo files. I bought a Canon G7. It’s now the camera I use if I am travelling or want something a bit more than the phone and it generates some great RAW files.

Some of the kiteshots I took over the years will make their way on to this site as I start to populate it. But, in general, I don’t miss that so much. It was fun and exciting for a while but it was also a lot of hard work. And carrying the equipment was increasingly hard. Long lenses are heavy. I wanted to switch back to travel photography (which, I sort of did until Covid happened and we all stopped travelling).

But there are a few stand out shots from my past and they will slowly make their way here.

Climate change, dreams and ice

In July 2022, the mountain guides in Chamonix are unwilling to do one of the main routes up to the top of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe. You can see this in mountaineering discussions on Reddit, and also, there are newspaper reports.

In Switzerland, the met service saw a new record for 0 degree altitude. This is a thing, and it is a thing I did not know about it until during the past week. They send up weather balloons, and they measure the altitude at which they hit 0 degrees. It’s logical, I guess, to do this. Anyway, the previous record was set in 1995, and they exceeded it by about 70 metres this year. 0 degrees is well above the top of the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc. You can tell too. I was in both Chamonix and Zermatt in the past 12 months; several times in the case of Zermatt. There is almost no snow on the Matterhorn, and what’s on the Breithorn, my favourite mountain because of how it resembles a wave, is fairly slushy looking. Zermatt is a year round skiing resort whose snow and ice seems to be melting. The risk of avalanches in the French Alps is considerably higher than usual, and the mountain guides in Chamonix are worried about rockfalls.

For a long time, the nearest I came to glaciers was a) gazing adoringly at them via Google satellite imagery and b) flying over them on the way to Italy.

20180922_153239 — Glacier, taken on a mobile phone, from a Luxair plane in 2018

I grew up in Ireland. We don’t have glaciers there. There’s one glacial fjord there (and I probably wouldn’t swim in the water either cos it would be uh glacial) . So I see glaciers as magical, and amazing and there are seriously people who dreamed of seeing glaciers but probably never well.

So to go to Zermatt to see the glaciers was super exciting for me. And then also to see the Mer de Glace in Chamonix.

The Mer de Glace has a special place in my memory, not least because I hurt my ankle the morning I went up on the train, and then down on the gondola, and then down the 600 odd steps to get under the glacier. It’s really nice in there, by the way, ice sculptures, stunning blue colours, and slanted strata interspersed with sand and mud here and there. It doesn’t snow much where I live now or where I grew up so this stuff is really very amazing to me. Walking back up the 600 steps on the other hand, that was challenging. We will discuss that memory some other time.

But, when the train went there first, the glacier was at the level of the train station. It isn’t any more. When you start taking the steps down to the glacier mouth, every so often, there is a plaque in the rock face telling you when the ice reached this level. They are closer and closer, the lower down into the valley you get. As an indication of the price of global warming, it’s very, very sobering.

I very regularly take a look at the web cam at the Gornergrat not far from Zermatt. (those webcams are dead handy for travel dreaming most days). What has struck me is how much less ice there is this year, compared to when I photographed it in June 2021. It’s just..amazing.

And utterly devastating.

This is why we do what we do.

Not sure why, but this picked up 275 views recently. The photograph is like, 14 years old. And it took me four hours to stitch together. I sort of miss stuff like this but honestly, I’m not sure I’m up for 4 hours of this kind of processing any more.

The kitesurfer is Eamon Armstrong, Ireland.

Day zero

This is like the first page of an empty sketchbook. What on earth do I put here?