Roshan Radhakrishnan

Out and About

Last summer (summer of 2025), I had the good fortune to go to a friend’s destination wedding in northern Italy. Not wanting to waste a trans-atlantic trip, we continued on after the wedding to Zermatt, Switzerland.

Lights On

My not-so-secret goal for this trip was to capture the Milky Way (or some star trails) around a mountain that was not Rainier. As you may infer from the heading photo on this post having a conspicuous amount of blue sky and sunlight, this did not work out as planned. There were pretty significant thunderstorms in the evenings (our Swiss hosts complained of “sweltering” 70F heat..), and each night we were there was fully cloudy.

A lack of clear nights did not stop me from taking pictures. I did keep my camera with me as we hiked the 5 lakes trail, and we had some pretty dramatic clouds rolling in and around Matterhorn as we made our way around the nearby valley.

This photo ended up having the best natural composition to my untrained and amateur eye. The clouds were moving around quite a bit, and the peak was visible for hardly a few minutes before getting covered up again. This shot used an f/22 aperture and 1/80sec exposure. I kept the ISO lower.

My general goal for daytime mountain shots has evolved into shooting something that feels ethereal and dramatic, since that is the essence of a massive snow-cap to me. I’m still very much figuring out how to balance exposure, aperture, and ISO to do this. Ideally I would have had this vantage point at sunset to do a slightly longer exposure, but with storms and rain coming in we did not want to get stuck out in the open.

I instead opted to up the drama a bit in editing, by bringing out the shadows and contrast a bit more, and adding some golden tints with white balance and an extra light source to help bathe the clouds and left face in some more golden tones. It was good to actually poke around with the light source options in affinity, and that ended up giving me more of the look/feel I wanted. I’ll have to go back to Zermatt (big sacrifice, I know) to get some sunset and night shots of the Matterhorn. Until then, I’m relatively happy with this one.