Sunrise on Ober Gabelhorn (4,063m), Wellenkuppe (3,093m) and Zinalrothon (4,221m) from Gornergrat (3089m)Canon EOS 5D Mark III, f/8 @ 73 mm, 1/80s, ISO 1250 I've just returned from a summer holiday in Zermatt, Switzerland, where I spent some time hiking in the fabulous Valais Alps. As well as enjoying the stunning scenery, I also had the opportunity to try out my Canon EOS 5D Mark III on landscape photography in a range of different lighting conditions.

For the trip, I took my Canon 5D Mk III, 24-105mm f4/L IS lens, and 70-200mm f4/L lens. I use a fixed UV filter with the 70-200 lens, but for the 24-105 lens, I had the opportunity to borrow a Heliopan variable gray 0.3-1.8 neutral density (ND) filter. This provides a reduction of 1 to 6 stops, which is very useful in the extreme lighting conditions in the Alps where there is intense glare from UV light reflected off the snowfields and glaciers. This enabled me to use longer exposures without suffering from saturated over exposure of snow fields. I found a few minor drawbacks using the Heliopan filter: at widest lens angles the filter produced some vignetting of images which I needed to manually correct in Aperture or Lightroom; also, the filter cannot be with the Canon 24-105mm lens cap or lens hood, which is a bit inconvenient. 

I also experimented with the 5D's in-camera HDR (high-dynamic range) processing - taking three photos of the same scene at different exposure levels, and then combining them into a single image. The result extracts more detail from a scene, but perhaps looks slightly over saturated?

I've uploaded some of the photos of the holiday to the Swiss Alps gallery (which also includes some photos which I took in 2010 using my Canon EOS 450D). I found some of the results quite pleasing, in particular the Sunrise over Ober Gabelthorn, Wellenkuppe and Zinalrothon and Sunrise on Matterhorn.  Hope you enjoy them!