The Icicle on the Mountain

Last spring, I went on a school trip to parts of Germany and Switzerland. I loved every second of it, and when our trip was coming to an end, one of our last stops was at Mount Pilatus (one of the mountains of the Swiss Alps). The weather was perfect; there was just enough snow for playing around and climbing but not too much that you couldn't go anywhere. The temperature was cold enough to keep the snow from melting, but it was still warm enough that we didn't need gloves. There was a huge snowdrift at one side of the platform, so naturally, some of my friends and I used it to climb over the platform and up to another level with a maintenance door and a shoveled out snow cave. While two of my friends were busy making the snow into snowballs for a siege on our comrades below, I spotted this lone icicle, which had held out against the warm weather but, slowly, was also melting. I was enchanted by the solitary beauty and resilience that that singular icicle projected, and I thought it would make a great picture. So I quickly snapped a few until and my friends called me back to help them make more snowballs. We went to the top of the mountain and then went back to the lift to take us down, and I thought nothing more of the picture I had taken.

Later that night, I was lying in bed going through the pictures I had taken during the day. As I was scrolling through and deleting the accidental inside-of-my-pocket pictures, I came across this one, and admittedly, my first thought was: did I really take that? The spontaneous nature of this droplet being in the photo, much less how perfectly spaced it is, amazes me. This turned out to be one of the best photos I took from my trip and I'm glad I was able to share this perfect moment with the world.

I'd like to think that the message of this photo that the true beauty of nature lies in its randomness. You can spend hours, waiting for the perfect moment with a five-thousand-dollar camera and come up empty. But oftentimes the perfect moment just comes to you -- you don't expect it, don't plan it, don't create it -- it just presents itself, ready to be captured. One of the premises of the contest is that using a phone is required. That constraint emphasizes that this contest isn't for those people that plant themselves in the ground until they get their shot, it’s for the people that stumble upon a flawless moment and think... "Wow. That's beautiful." and they take out their phone and snap a quick picture, and keep on going with their lives, not realizing the gem of a photograph they took. You truly don’t have to be a professional photographer to get an amazing shot, and I think this picture exemplifies that.

I got this shot from an iPhone XR, without any special lenses or anything, and used the default iPhone camera app to take the picture. I first modified it on an app called “PS Express” to make the picture brighter and the colors to pop by adding more blue temperature (because the primary elements to the picture were snow and ice) and a little bit of saturation to the image. Since I recently gained access to the real Photoshop, I fixed a few other problems with the base of the icicle (the base wasn’t an even curve, so I fixed that with more ice) and patched up some underexposed areas in the background.