Shadows On-Piste – My Best Photo of 2025

My name is Harrison Matthew, and I am a hobbyist photographer with one foot each in film and digital, preferring rangefinders and always looking for ways to bury myself further in the photographic process. I took what I believe to be my best photograph of 2025 on January 30th. Some might say this set me up for a gradual downward slope of disappointment for the next 11 months. I however like to think it represented a strong start to my year!

I try to limit myself to at most one large, indulgent vacation each year, something where I actively travel somewhere exotic, any place so different to my day-to-day that just existing there is inspirational. For 2025 this was a week-long ski trip to British Columbia, Canada with my good friend Dave. We’d spent the latter half of 2024 booking hotel stays, consulting resort maps, and setting up a rough itinerary for the week and a half in the rugged white north. Travel plans were locked in, and we were set to fly into Calgary for the last week of January.

The planning and execution of this trip also coincided with my own transition from “Amateur Hobbyist Photographer” to “Amateur Hobbyist Photographer Who Believes He May Occasionally Take a Good Photograph”. I felt that my practice and intention with my cameras were starting to show results, and that I needed to start actively working on building a concrete style and portfolio, a body of work. It seemed that this trip to the vast and wild Canadian Rockies would be my opportunity to produce some serious images. So, I packed a Mamiya 645 Pro with a handful of 120 Ektachrome and 135 color negative film, my trusty Rollei 35 T, and a Sony RX100 IV relegated to be the digital “backup camera” (at this time I still fancied myself primarily a film shooter, a notion which I have since disabused myself of over the course of the year).

Needless to say, I did not hesitate to pester Dave at every opportunity to pull the car off the highway and wait as I set up my tripod, painstakingly metered, and squeezed the cable release nervously. I was convinced these would be some of my best photos yet, sweeping mountains against blue skies and golden hour light, all on luscious 645 medium format. Some of these photos even turned out okay! I was incredibly stressed about shooting slide film for the first time, and took far too many “safety shots”. This, combined with a back-focusing issue that I later discovered with the M645 body I was using led to quite a lot of lackluster images. However, I have included two here which I feel are among my favorites.

No, my best photo of the year was much more spontaneous and unplanned which I think suits the romantic qualities we all associate with the art of photography. While we were staying at Kicking Horse resort in the town of Golden, each day when we went out to ski I would pack either the Rollei 35 or the RX100 into my ski jacket. This is precisely the purpose I own both for, after all. They’re compact, produce lovely images, and are rugged enough to survive not only being kept in a chilly outer jacket pocket but also the inevitable slopeside tumble I seem to take once every ski trip.

It was on one of the middle days of skiing Kicking Horse, when Dave and I were taking the central chair back up. We were discussing which of the alpine bowls to transition to for our next run. The day was getting long, and the shadows had begun to stretch down the eastern-facing aspects of the ski slopes. We were mid-conversation, and my eyes immediately caught on the thin parallel shadows of sparse alpine trees, reaching like eager fingers down the slope after a pair of skiers. I frantically dug out the RX100 I had brought with me, fumbled with my gloves framing it up, and rattled off about eight slight variations of the shot as the chair lift slowly shifted our perspective of the scene. Back in the lodge that evening, loading them up onto my phone for quick-view, I stopped on one in the middle of the set and let out under my breath “I think this might be the best photo I’ve ever taken.”

The texture in the snow like grain in stone, the leading lines of the trees and their shadows, and the size contrast of the tiny subjects against the vast openness of the landscape immediately struck me. Rendering the image into black & white only enhanced these features to my eye, and it turns out these qualities would go on to later inform the styles and themes which I would gradually develop in my favorite images throughout the year.

While I’d certainly like to surpass it some day, I think it was an excellent way to start off 2025. Though I haven’t yet finished assembling a body of work that brings me pride, this has absolutely been a year of finding my own style, and this photo from BC was a critical first step towards that. Seeing this as the reward for that instinctive, emotional reaction to capture the scene also helped reinforce instincts I still try to cultivate with an aware and intentioned approach to photography. As a bonus, here are two of my favorite images I took at Kicking Horse resort with the Rollei 35 T, on Ultramax.

Thank you for your time reading this first contribution of mine to the website. With time and a little luck, I hope to piece together some other articles worth your attention in the future. Until then, feel free to follow me on Instagram, and on Flickr as well once I get a page set up! Cheers, and have a wonderful day.

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