I’ve currently been a photographer of mountains for far longer than I’ve been a photographer of anything else - including track and field athletics.
For many years, I was lucky enough to spend time in the Italian Dolomites every year, often on more than one occasion a year. I have literally thousands of pictures of these mountains, and from that collection I’ve selected what amounts to a small percentage of my personal favourites. Almost all of these pictures were taken on film (remember film?). There are many, many more I need to scan to digital form when I get time.
Like my own memories of the place, these photographs have become a jumble of images over time. Neither of the galleries are sorted in any particular order. That’s really down to me being a bit lazy, I’m afraid.
My Dolomites photos were shot on a miscellany of cameras, ranging from a little Rollei 35 to a 6x7 Bronica. Very few indeed in the first two galleries here were shot on a digital camera. I’ve begun the process of building an archive with digital versions from more recent visits, but haven't got very far with it yet. However, I can’t ever hope to cover all of the old ground I've visited. There’s still far too many places I’ve not yet visited, for a start!
The Dolomites are top of my list of "must go back" places. Unfortunately three trips in recent years got cancelled owing to circumstances outside my control, and the one before that was just basically an opportunity to drive many of the roads in an open-topped kit car. (Yes, it rained for that!)
Click here to see the photographs in Gallery 1
Click here to see the photographs in Gallery 2
Most of these shots are “my personal favourites”. However, if forced to pick out my top choices, they’d be (for very different reasons) the “red hat” shot, and the photo of me sitting reading the “Gazzetta Dello Sport” on the top of the Kesselkogel. The latter was taken on my camera, though not by me (of course). I often carried around a copy of the newspaper to read in quiet moments.
In September and October 2013, I had the opportunity to spend quality time in the Dolomites again, this time armed with a digital camera, though I did haul around my 6x7 Bronica GS medium format camera on many days too. My 100 best photos from that visit are here:
Click to see the photographs in Gallery 3.
These days I'm just not finding enough time to visit the Dolomites, and need to work on that!
If you are also interested in the Dolomites, please visit my other web site, devoted to The Great Dolomite Road It’s a labour of love that has been very well received. It’s also a project that I think will never actually be “finished”!
I also occasionally blog the story behind some of my Dolomites photographs, and others from elsewhere I’ve visited, at “A Blog on a Landscape” .
NOTE. Added July 2018
There have recently been several instances when photos from my Dolomites galleries have been gathered, without my consent into people's Pinterest collections. From there, they have been cropped to exclude my logo, and then passed off in other online media as the work of others. If this happens once more, I will be replacing the galleries with copies of the photos with a much more intrusive logo, specifically to deter those who want to claim my work as their own. Sorry to everyone else that it will make the photos less easy to enjoy.
