Taken above the Rifugio Alfonso Berti in the Dolomites, Italy, on July 18, 2016

The Dolomites are full of quaint little gems of huts, and Alfonso Berti is certainly one of them. A fun, 1-hour hike through extraordinary scenery leads to the hut, which boasts pristine alpine views in every direction. The beauty doesn’t end there though. Trails lead off higher up over, through, and around the mountain cirque. In fact, you can see the Rifugio in the lower left part of this snapshot from an afternoon scamper I took with my buddy Cip. On our second night staying at the hut we hiked up an hour or so to the northwest ridge of the mountains, to where WWI trenches are still in place, and still explorable. As afternoon turned into evening clouds built up and began to interact with the sun in glorious ways. Just before sunset I stumbled on a patch of wildflowers that complemented the color of the clouds as the sky exploded, a true Berti bomb.

Key Learning Tip:
It’s important to think of your photographs like visual stories. And just like a written story an effective photograph will have some kind of an opening hook to lure viewers in, details that help propel the story through the frame, and a finale. When using a wide-angle these three elements can be found in your foreground, middle-ground, and background. choose an eye-catching foreground element to draw your viewers into the frame. your mid-ground should give some environmental details that tell what a place is like. And your background element should provide some kind of visual payoff and sense of place. the more deliberately you choose these three elements for your photograph, the stronger the visual story you will create. 

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See more beautiful Dolomites photos here.