Rio Grande National Forest, September 19, 2020

On Saturday, September 19, 2020 we photographed just off of a roadway not too far from Platoro Reservoir. I made a few shots with the reservoir and mountainside behind.  This one is my favorite:

It takes considerable thought making compositions within a forest.  Even though there is natural beauty all around, it is not as easy as one might think to make an interesting photograph with so much around that can be distracting or unappealing in an image and, after a while, one begins to think that the compositions are too common and repetitive.

I found the contrast of the small evergreens among the tall, rugged Aspens interesting.

And again I found boulders with fallen Aspen leaves decorating them in the forest.

Near the roadway I found a number of Aspens that had started growing horizontally, maybe from some early life damage, but that had turned to grow upward toward the sky.

As I later discovered, it was not unusual to find such curved shapes in the Aspen trunks.  I’m sure there must be a logical explanation for this unusual growth pattern.

I spotted a small shimmering Aspen tree that really stood out against the darker surroundings.  I included the small tree as a highlight in a wide angle image.  When reviewing that photograph, I decided to crop the image, making it more apparent that the small tree was the primary object of interest .

I made a few close up images of the yellow Aspen leaves late in the day.  I had brought only a wide angle lens on this shoot.  The wide angle close ups always include much more than I wanted in the images, so I cropped them during editing to pick out the portions that I was trying to capture.

It was late in the day and the sun was rapidly sinking in the sky, but I managed to get a few images with weak back light, then a few more with dispersed light. The three presented here are the ones that I like best.

More later,

Ken