The Photo

Possibly one of the most beautiful places I have visited in my entire life, the Pian Grande in the Sibillini National Park, Umbria, Italy is a large mountain plain at around 1600m. It is incredibly flat and completely surrounded by snow covered peaks - the peak you see in this shot is Mt Vettore, the highest in the region at 2476 meters.

The thing about this place is that you're never going to stumble across it by accident..it has a tiny village, Castalluccio, population 150 located at one end of the plain and there are two tiny roads which run up to it from the valleys below.
I'd heard about the place before, looked it up on Google Earth, and arranged to stay in the area, but even so, from the nearest other town of Norcia it's around 30 km which takes you around countless hair-pin bends and lifts you 1km higher as you drive up and over the pass to the plain.

Arriving there though feels as though you've discovered a lost world. The plain stretches out before you and it really is indescribably beautiful. I'd seen pictures of it before, but they didn't prepare me for how stunning a place it is. Teresa, my wife, was amazed - it really feels like a special and secret place.

It's somewhere I'd love to return to in winter when it's completely covered in snow, and later in the year when the whole plain is covered in flowers. It's also a great location at dawn when the plain is covered in mist,

We spent 3 nights in Umbria, and I came here every evening. The first night we didn't realise how long it would take us to reach, and we missed the best light (as the sun sets earlier being obscured by high peaks to the west). This was particularly annoying because on the road up, I could see how great the light was, the clouds were taking on lots of colour which had all gone by the time I was in place to shoot. A lenticular cloud which had been hugging the peak was just dispersing.
I was, to put it mildly, annoyed.

The second day was overcast, and although we waited and waited, the light never came.

The last day was wonderful and we were up here 2 hours before sunset. In good light there is simply so much to shoot in every direction, and by the time the light began to peak I was set up in this position next to a flooded part of the field which reflected the mountain. I stood in the same spot shooting every nuance of the different light and colour as the clouds raced across the sky, and I think in all the time I've been taking photos, there are maybe 2 or 3 times when I have been as completely overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene as this...
Teresa saw me from 100 meters away jumping up and down and punching the air

As I said, I took a lot of shots on this particular evening, some long exposures, some like this, shorter ones to capture the definition in the cloud, but I think this is my favourite because of the last kiss of light on the slopes of the mountain beneath the cloud.

I used a 3 stop NDG filter pulled down to the base of the mountain to balance the sky and mountain with it's reflection.


Metadata

Taken at Pian Grande, Sibillini National Park, Umbria, Italy
Nikon D3 | Nikkor 17-35 f2.8 ED
Gitzo GT2541 tripod w/ Gitzo GH1780QR ballhead
Lee 0.9 (3 stop) soft edged neutral density filter
1/20 | f13 | 17mm

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