“The most beautiful country”. Victory in a competition from the RGS

Route 80K-031 

…We are driving around Bashkiria in a car heading towards the city of Uchaly. The day’s segment of the journey ran from Ufa to the destination through the mountain pass of the Southern Urals. It was late autumn in the foothills; the trees had shed almost all their autumn leaves. The first short stop was in the small village of Arkhangelskoye.

The first breath of winter 

As we further approached the Ural Mountains, the density of the lying snow cover on the roadside and slopes increased. The tops of the hills were white from the clouds clinging to them.

Kingdom of Snow 

With the increase in altitude during the further trip, the temperature dropped significantly, the surrounding landscape was extremely transformed — as if it was not the beginning of November, as it was below on the plain, but real January itself. The road was sometimes straight and sometimes twisted into serpentines. Fortunately, we replaced the summer tires on the car with studded ones in advance of the trip, because a thin crust of frozen ice glittered on the asphalt.

Observation deck 

Several hours of travel had left their mark, I wanted to go out to stretch my legs and do other things, and just enjoy the beauty of nature. We noticed a site which we turned into. On the navigator it is listed as an “observation point”, but from the ground there was nothing around except the road and trees bent under the weight of the stuck snow. Location coordinates: 54.303937, 57.403792

What’s on top? 

I realized that in terms of landscape photographs from the ground from this point I am extremely limited. While my colleagues were eating, I decided to launch my drone, which I later did not regret for a minute…

A look from a different angle 

…the planet was rapidly moving away and an amazing panorama of the expanses of the Southern Urals mountain system opened up on the remote control display. The mountains and hills seemed to be covered with silver, and rare low clouds, licking their tops, flowed driven by a light wind. The rays of the low sun break through the dense haze and mid-level clouds. The road along which we are moving stretches somewhere towards the horizon and turns to nowhere.

That’s the same 

Of all the footage shot that day, after viewing and processing, I liked this photo the most, which was proposed for the competition. My intuition did not let me down and our views with the majority of the jury and spectators coincided. 

There were truly a huge number of worthy, interesting and powerful works in the aerial photography category. And winning the competition gives me a powerful incentive for further travel, discoveries and, of course, continued improvement in the field of photography, the development of vision and the search for beauty in the world around me.