Talented photographer Melody Sky tells Lauren Robertson about her life in Switzerland.
WHEN the owner of a scuba diving school thrust a camera into the hands of Melody Sky at the side of a swimming pool in Cyprus, little did he know the waves he was about to make.
Now Melody sits at her desk looking out of her window to the Swiss Alps beyond.
She thinks of the hamlet of Fontenelle as “Fontenelle Heaven”, perfectly situated in a gap in the mountains that allows the sun to stretch through the valley and touch it, but also within reach of the world-famous pistes of Verbier.
Melody, who was born in Aberdeenshire, has had dinner in her own home three times since November.
This week she is preparing for her photography exhibition on the conflict between humans and animals, and will then spend a week with a man who won a competition to go ski touring with her.
Photos from a recent shoot of night-skiing are still to be edited.
That’s alongside her usual marketing work and photography commissions for Verbier, the Swiss ski haven.
She recalls the moment that kick-started it all.
“I was a competitive swimmer, so when I was in Cyprus doing a summer season I got a job as a lifeguard,” Melody says.
“There was a guy who would come and do pool demos for scuba diving, and I jumped in one day and loved it.
“I did a five-day course and, at the end of it, the guy who owned the dive school was loading up his camera to go and shoot people underwater.
“He was doing it in a weird way, so I went over and asked if he wanted me to show him how to do it in an easier way.
“Well, he lost it. He threw the camera at me and basically said I should do it if I thought I knew it all.
“I took on the challenge, he got the photos developed overnight and the next morning he asked me to become the school’s underwater photographer.”
It was during childhood years spent in Cornwall that Melody’s love of adventure developed.
“My dad got into surfing and my mum was really into photography, so that’s where I kind of got the sports and photography bug,” she says.
That day in Cyprus led Melody to be paid for her photography for the first time.
She spent the next three summers at the dive school, as her colleagues attempted to talk her into swapping the sea for the snow.
“They wanted me to go to Tignes in the French Alps for the winters, but I told them
