alps

A flying Santa has been throwing cameras to people from the sky. But instead of using a sleigh, he's paragliding.

The night has fallen. I am alone, on top of a mountain, at an altitude of 3,000 meters (~9,800 feet). Fog is floating along through the valleys below, illuminated by the pale light of the moon. For a moment I feel like I've landed on a distant planet, lost in space. It's a privilege to be here, a refreshment of the soul.

Thomas Heaton is quickly becoming an industry-favorite landscape photographer thanks, in large part, to the informative videos he's been creating, and his latest video is no exception. In it, he shows you how he's planning, packing, and otherwise preparing for a major landscape photography trip to the Alps.

I have always wanted to see the Alps. They look so grand in the movies. After my roadtrip through the Norwegian mountains in 2014, it felt like the next step would be to see the Alps. But the question was: in which country?

Swiss mountaineering brand Mammut frequently teams up with talented mountaineering photographer Robert Böesch to capture incredibly creative photographs that show off some of the Alps’ most renowned peaks alongside the Mammut gear that has often helped humans reach the summits of those peaks unharmed.

From the gorgeous Matterhorn image above -- captured for the company's 2015 ad campaigns -- to the many images you'll see below, each is a work of extreme coordination, patience, and photographic skill.

Outdoor brand Mammut recently teamed up with avid climbers Dani Arnold and Stephan Siegrist to document and create an incredible interactive 360º climb up the side of Eiger: a 13,000-foot tall mountain in the Alps.

Welcome to South Tyrol, a province at the northernmost point of Italy located entirely in the Alps. A rough, mountainous region, your tour guide through the spectacular vistas offered by this province is 23-year-old landscape and urban photographer Lukas Furlan.

If you live in a place that's not likely to see snow this winter, or you're bitter that the white Christmas you've been dreaming of decided to remain a dream, these stunning photos of the European Alps by Swedish photographer Jacob Sjöman will either ease the pain, or make you incredibly jealous. Either way, they're worth a look.

As copyright disputes go, this one sits squarely on the border between strange and stranger. We've seen plenty of people have their photography rights infringed upon, and it wasn't even that long ago we saw it happen over Instagram, but we've never seen the president of an entirely republic make that mistake.

We humans may be apex predators, but we're rather tiny when compared to the sheer scale of nature and landforms. Polish photographer Jakub Połomski captured this fact through his project titled, "The Scale of Nature." Połomski visited the Alps in France and Switzerland between 2008 and 2012, and shot a series of aerial photographs showing mountain climbers being dwarfed by the awe-inspiring snow-capped mountains they're traversing.

Here's a beautiful behind-the-scenes video that takes us on an adventure with Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen as he shoots extreme skiing at the foot of Mont Blanc. Bendiksen was testing the Leica S2 medium-format DSLR -- typically thought of as a studio camera -- to see how it stands up in harsh outdoor environments.