Snowfall in Portugal is not common. The country has a mild climate favourable for tourism, one of the main economic activities. However, in the interior centre and north, on some days during the winter, it can snow for a few hours.

When reviewing my archive of analogue photography, I found this image captured in February 1982, therefore more than four decades ago, when I was wandering through the Serra de Bornes, in Tras-os-Montes province, with a maximum altitude reaching 1,200 meters. Snow fell on the pines. I was fascinated and marvelled by the shine of the snow illuminated by an almost frontal light.

I tried to capture the moment using the excellent Ilford FP-4 B&W film and developing it with a Kodak D-25, a medium-contrast fine-grain film developer.

The massive use made today of digital photography, generally in colour, perhaps leads us to forget the potential of using black-and-white to capture snowy landscapes, which, in reality, can present a relatively limited chromatic spectrum. Why not explore the potential of black-and-white in winter landscape photography?