Dino Vournas, Best Photo Mountain Landscape, 2004 Banff Mountain Photography Competition

"I don’t normally shoot through a dirty bus window, but in this case I had no choice. I was on a mid-winter tour of the Alaskan coast with members of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association, returning to Alyeska Resort from a day trip to the port of Seward on the Kenai Peninsula. All along the drive, we were treated to one neck-snapping view after another. We stopped briefly to take in a particularly beautiful moon and mountain landscape and then headed down the highway. About a hundred yards around the next corner, I spotted this scene and shot off, as I recall, a single frame through the glass before it disappeared from view. At first I didn’t have a lot of hope for this photograph, but perhaps the road-grime ‘filter’ enhanced the overall light-and-shadows effect."

Dino Vournas, who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been a photojournalist for 33 years, with stints at the (Hayward) Daily Review and the Oakland Tribune and as Director of Photography at the San Francisco Examiner. Dino is presently freelancing for the Associated Press and pursuing his interests in ski, mountain and outdoor photography and in travel writing. He has photographed in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Arctic and has covered most major sporting events and many natural phenomena including a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, an earthquake and a total solar eclipse. Dino’s career began when as an 11-year-old he went on a trip to Yosemite, armed with an Ansco box camera.

dino.v@att.net