Today was the first day of the Frisco Art Festival. Set up started at 5:00am and I have been up since 4:45am. Why I'm still awake is a mystery to me, but I did have a few images from this trip I wanted to post. The top one is from Maroon Bells near Aspen. We drove there on Wednesday morning for a shoot. Not many clouds but other than that it was pretty good conditions. On Thursday evening we went to the Shrine Mountain Pass where I shot the panoramic image below. It was one of those evenings where I set my camera in position and then waited for the light to do something neat. The sky
clouded up and looked like nothing would happen at sunset. Suddenly, the sun hit the distant mountains. It only lasted for about a minute. I was shooting a series of six images to stitch together and created what you see below.
We stayed several days at the Gore Creek campground just outside of Vail. Lots of flowers and aspens nearby. The image below was created by zooming the lens and vertically panning the camera during a one second exposure.
After the show today my brother and I spent some time photographing two old trucks and a couple of old log cabins. And where were they were located? Behind the porta-potties. The trucks looked like they had been sitting and deteriorating for years. This license plate is a year older than I am. Wow!
During my recent trip to Colorado I spent a morning at one of the most photographed locations in the country, Maroon Bells. It is not hard to see why this area just outside of Aspen is so popular. Majestic mountain peaks with a clear mountain lake to reflect a mirror image of the scene. This was my second time to spend a morning at MB. Both times the lake has been perfectly calm until about 15 minutes before sunrise then the wind came up and bye-bye reflection. I did create a pre-dawn HDR image of the scene before the wind came up. Once the reflections were gone I decided to move to the field on the north side of the lake and use some of the wildflowers as a foreground. The first two images were both made from a series of three exposures.
As the sun rose higher in the sky I hiked a short distance above Maroon Lake where I could use Maroon Creek in the foreground of the last image. As pretty as it is in August , it still doesn't compare with late September when the cool fall weather changes the Aspen trees to bright shades of yellow.
