October Morning

Mountains make their own weather.  I woke under clear skies and cursed through the dawn for some drama.  Didn't happen until I finished dressing and packing up for a long hike.  Ok, better late than later.  Instead of hiking, I dodged bursts of rain and wind and chased little hits of sunshine around the aspen groves.  I carry an umbrella as a standard part of my camera gear, it's the best for keeping both rain and sun off your lens.

Let Them Go, They Will Return

Walking back the Jeep, I was struck by the beauty of this composition.  The colour was muted by the overcast sky, the air had warmed enough to make me sleepy and I just wanted to lay in the grass listening to the gentle rustle of Autumn.  (it's Monday, who doesn't want to go back to bed)

Last Spin Of The Summer

Spin, spin, great circle!
Ninety-six minutes during the last night of summer as a full moon lights the changing aspens of Veedauwoo.  Smoke from a fire in the expanse of land northwest of this location hangs low and is illuminated by the negligible light pollution of Laramie, WY.

The Broken Bridge

Seems like every fall, I find a composition that allows me to place a sun star in the leaves of an aspen tree.  As if on queue, I clamboured across this bridge and turned around to play.  Sometimes you just get lucky.

Ponds Below Elbert

Mount Elbert, 14,440' (right), is the highest peak in CO, and the highest in the Rocky Mountains of NA.  Might not look that way from this vantage, but once you start walking up the hill, you quickly realize the scale.  No filtration, no multiple exposure fancy compositing, just a single 2.5 second click before dawn.  The sun rising into thin clouds way way way out east, which was killing the colour in the sky, but bathing the ground in a soft warm pink light.  After snapping this, I scrambled down the hill through the stream and over to my second perch for the morning.  This light wasn't going to last!

The Cast Removed

This photograph is the same as the one in my earlier post.  But the great yellow glow was just too much, so I corrected this for the little bit of blue sky in the left of the frame.  Not much different, but certainly a more natural balance to the scene.  Artistically, I prefer the other photograph, which is what I was pursuing at the time.  Only in hindsight, did I consider that the yellow from the filter gives a fantastical and sinister quality to the photograph, and a more natural balance might be more alluring to the viewer and therefore, bring the photograph closer to the idea.  Incidentally, all preferences aside, this is the version I submitted to a recent contest, because when it comes down to scrutiny, you can't argue with natural colour.  Hope you enjoy both!

As They Whisper, So They Move

I started down this road while waiting for a couple of noisy folk on quads to leave the area.  In many ways I'm like the wildlife, people come and I go.  Downhill, to be accurate.  Not much was happening photographically, I was at an elevation of 8600 feet without a single cloud in the late afternoon sky.  The fall colour was about a week before the real peak would happen.  There are some beaver ponds in the area that I wanted to scout for the following morning's sunrise shoot.  You'll see those trickle through the blog in the next few days.  So, with all that sun, I had been playing with the blue/yellow varicolour filter, does interesting stuff to the light when all you have is big bright sun.  The colour in this photo is from stacking the filter with a polarizer.  Instant autumnal peak!  At the bottom of the hill was a drained pond and thick mud.  The road took a hard 165 degree turn to avoid the mud, but the photographer did not.  Instead I plodded through to see the area just behind the former dam and found another little pond.  Lots of dead trees sticking up through thick muddy water.  Time to turn around.  Walking back up the hill, I noticed the way these trees leaned and bent over the road.  The autumn glow gave the impression they are playful among themselves, but cautious with outsiders.