Sunrise over Mt. Powell Breckenridge, Colorado My coworker Ana is another landscape photographer like myself. She lives in Slovenia and has some of the most amazing photographs ever taken of her country. She visited the USA for manager training and realized that the end of the trip was perfect for photographing fall colors in Colorado and asked if I would join her. I've long wanted to shoot Colorado fall and this was a perfect excuse. We flew into Denver, picked up the rental car and spent our first night near Breckenridge. Our photographer friend, Nick Selway, had moved to Brek to open a photo gallery and met up with us for sunrise. He knew the perfect spot to take us for sunrise so we hopped in his car and drove about 20 minutes outside of town. I was the pessimist for the day -- the clouds looked too thick to light up. Nick, on the other hand, kept screaming "this is going to be great! Just you wait!" And sure enough when the sun rose over the hills behind us, the clouds over the mountains lit up with a beautiful orange. A dusting of snow fell overnight and capped the mountain peaks for just that extra bit of goodness. D850 w/Nikkor 80-200: 200mm, f/11, 1/30 sec, ISO 320
Painted WoodRedwood Trees Muir Woods, Marin Headlands, California Being in the mood to hang out with the trees and see some beautiful things, Willie, Alan, Sammi and I woke up early one Saturday morning and drove up to Muir Woods. The intent was to shoot the Redwood trees shrouded in fog and then stop in at the Muir Woods Trading Co Cafe for one of their famous Grilled Cheese sandwiches. Everything started off great and then fell completely apart. As we drove to Muir Woods the fog level looked perfect. There was a ton of fog on the coast and it looked low enough to seep into Muir Woods. After navigating the windy roads and making sure Willie's breakfast stayed in his stomach we arrived at Muir Woods early enough to have no problem finding parking. In fact, it was still so early that the rangers hadn't arrived to change the "Entrance Fee: FREE!" sign to "Entrance Fee: $7"! Lucky us. We decided to hike up so we could get back to the higher elevation fog. We hiked up. No fog. We kept hiking. Still no fog. On we went. FOG! Oh wait, no Redwood trees. Walk some more. Hey look, Redwood grove! Oh right, no fog. We took some photos of trees and moved on. Sammi's not a photographer and she brought a book with her and read while we shot. At one point as we started to leave a patch of trees she said "did you guys look behind you?" Of course we hadn't. That's when we saw all the trees had lined up beautifully. With no fog we decided to go a bit abstract and try some "camera painting." Using a long shutter and keeping our tripod bullheads loose, we panned the camera up as the shutter stayed open for 1-2 seconds. Thus the effect you see here! Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 AF-D: 185mm, f/10, 1.6 seconds, ISO 400
Sunrise over Tunnel Mtn Road Banff National Park, Canada Going into every photo trip I have high hopes that I'll come home with a number of portfolio worthy photos. Sometimes I come home disappointed, sometimes my expectations are met, and other times I'm completely blown away by the number of gorgeous photos. Our trip to Banff in November 2015 was certainly the latter. Not only did we get the big mountain scenes I was hoping for, but there were a number of beautiful intimate scenes. Willie and I didn't expect our last morning to have much photography potential but we dragged ourselves out of bed anyways and decided to head towards Lake Minnewanka. Along the drive we looked up at the sky, saw it glowing with a pre-burn, got super excited, and diverted to the closer Tunnel Mountain Road and view of Mt. Rundle. We witnessed an absolutely beautiful sunrise. As the sun came up, a layer of fog developed and caught the warm sunrise light. I loved how it transformed this entire area of snow covered trees into those golden orange scene. I had to throw on the telephoto lens and capture all the light that just warmed my heart. Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8: 185mm, f/11, 1/5 sec, ISO 100
