After our morning shoot, my son wanted to explore some of the other Forest Service Roads nearby, so we drove along several of those and into higher elevations, where most of the trees had already lost most of their leaves.
It was an overcast day and the dispersed light was good for photographing in the forest.
The Aspen leaf in this photo had not quite completed its color transformation, before it fell to rest upon a mossy bed.
Yellow and Green, Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/1250s, f/11, ISO 5000.Aspen Leaves on Mossy Stump, Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/160s, f/11, ISO 3200.Forest floor, Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/200s, f/11, ISO 3200.
I prefer to photograph these little details as I find them; but sometimes I’m tempted to move things around. I did not move anything in the photo above; but I can’t help but wonder, if I should have. Should I have removed the blade of grass pointing at the Aspen leaf in the middle? Or does that blade of grass serve as a useful pointer in this photograph? Would this image be better, if I had cleared away some of the debris around the edges or the scattered leaves, leaving just the single leaf in the center? What about that little twig resting on the stump to the left of the center leaf?
I have no objection to “posing” a natural scene for artistic purpose and I have removed man made items from natural scenes and I’m quite ok with this. I’ve occasionally removed a twig, a fallen tree limb or a blade of grass, if I thought those were distracting in a scene. But nature is not perfect, so will “cleaning” a scene make it unreal? Is unreal ok in this sense? No one would know the scene has been modified, if not so informed by the photographer. Is it acceptable to “manufacture” a natural scene?
Red and Green, Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/250s, f/11, ISO 800.Aspen Leaf, Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 65mm, 1/200s, f/11, ISO 800.
And I will wrap up this portion of this morning’s photos with one final forest image, which I just noted this morning was chosen for Flickr’s Explore page.
We went into the forest that surrounded our campsite again this morning. It is getting more difficult to find scenes that are significantly different than others that have already been photographed.
I’m trying to give more attention to the small, intimate details in the forest.
Aspen Leaf on Forest Floor. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/200s, f/11, ISO 2000.Aspen Leaf in Evergreen. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/125s, f/11, ISO 2500.Aspen Leaf on Stump. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/125s, f/11, ISO 2500.
Occasionally, I find stumps that indicate a tree has been purposely cut down. I do not know why, but I suspect they were felled by hunters to make their hunting blinds, which I have seen scattered around the forest.
I had not explored much of the forest on the west side of the utility right of way, where I was camped. So today, I decided to continue into that portion of the forest for a while to finish my late day shoot.
In the above image, I was actually trying to capture the highlights along a barbed wire fence. The intended images did not come out very well, but in this one I caught a couple of falling leaves, which are blurred due to the shutter speed not being fast enough to freeze their motion.
I will confess that I modified the scene above by adding the yellow Aspen leaf on the upper right side. I wish I had removed the twig on the left side.
The image above is my favorite in this portion of this post. I really like the late day shadows and highlights on the trunks and the streaks of light on the forest floor.
I found an Aspen tree trunk not too far from another camping area, where hunters were camped, with this message on it. I promise I did not do this and I do not know Beth!
I stayed around my campsite in the afternoon, waiting for my son and his wife to arrive from the Denver area. To occupy some of my time I sat outdoors, enjoying the mild weather, reading on my Kindle.
Rio Grande National Forest Campsite. iPhone photograph.
I kept seeing a curious chipmunk scampering about the campsite. It even jumped onto the arm of my camp chair, startling me.
A curious chipmunk. iPhone photograph.
At one point, I noticed the chipmunk on the side step below the side door of my vehicle, peering inside. This immediately alarmed me and I jumped up to shoo it away. Even though I had the bug screen zipped closed, I had neglected to completely fasten the bottom velcro seal. It was too late. The chipmunk entered my vehicle. I went in to try to find it and encourage it to go back outside.
There are plenty of places inside my vehicle for such a small animal to hide. While I was searching for the chipmunk, my son and DIL arrived. I left the vehicle to greet them, after which I continued to search for the chipmunk. I never found the chipmunk and I feared it pouncing upon me as I lay sleeping at night. Even if the chipmunk did not do harm itself, the shock of being pounced upon in the middle of the night might have caused a physical reaction resulting in my harming myself. I was also concerned it might hitch a ride back to my home or die inside the vehicle. To my relief, it apparently found its way back into the great outdoors of Colorado.
Late in the afternoon, we walked into the forest for an afternoon shoot.
Our wandering through the forest eventually led us to an open area on a steep slope, above another portion of the forest below. I saw streaks of light highlighting the grasses, similar to those I had shot, without great success, the previous day. But today I managed to get a much better image, with the image below, my favorite from this afternoon’s shoot. I cropped the image to remove the tops of trees and some sky in the wide angle image that distracted from the main subject, a beam of light, cutting diagonally across the image and ending at a small Aspen.
Leaving this area, we walked back towards the utility roadway. Until I looked closely at the image below, I had not realized that it included a portion of my DIL near the bottom left. I was shooting up from a slope and she was just on the other side of a rise.
Aspens and Late Day Starburst. Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @ 24mm (before crop), 1/200s, f/11, ISO 800.Aspens and Starburst. Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @ 24mm, 1/200s, f/11, ISO 200.
I shot the image above from the utility right of way, looking into the forest to the west of the roadway.
I will cover the last portion of this shoot in the next blog.
I continued to wander about in a portion of the Rio Grande National Forest in the early morning looking for whatever caught my eye, attempting to get a few decent photographs.
Evergreen surrounded by Aspens. Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @ 24mm, 1/400s, f/11, ISO 800.
I made a couple of compositions with this evergreen surrounded by the tall Aspens, but I do not think that the resulting images convey what I was seeing or feeling here.
The same is true of this photograph of the remnant of a burned tree trunk. I tried multiple compositions here and I just could not capture the scene the way it moved me. I think the lack of light on the burned out tree trunk made it too difficult to capture the emotions this stirred in me as I viewed it; although, this image does look better when viewed on a large screen.
A little later, I came back to the burned out tree trunk and shot it from a different point of view and got what I think is a better image with it surrounded by fallen, weathered Aspen trunks.
After my morning shoot near my campsite, I drove westerly along FSR 380. There were several possible campsites that I had noted from passing through this route earlier in the week. I drove past the first couple of sites to a large open unrestricted camping area that seemed to be popular with hunters. There were maybe a few places in that site that might have worked, but it was hilly, uneven, partially muddy and crowded with hunters. So I backtracked to the only other suitable site in a utility right of way.
Rio Grande National Forest Campsite. iPhone photograph.
There was plenty of room here for my vehicle and my son and DIL’s vehicle and trailer. They were planning to meet me here tomorrow. So I put out a couple of cones to mark an area for them, to discourage any other campers or hunters from moving in.
The view from the Sportsmobile awning window. iPhone photograph.
As I was mounting my solar panels on the top of my vehicle, a cowboy on horseback, herding a couple of cows, approached from a little side road into the forest. He stopped to ask if I had seen any cattle nearby. When I said no, he then asked if I was a hunter. When I told him I was here only for photography, he told me about one of his relatives that was a professional photographer who traveled around the world making photographs.
After the cowboy moved on, I noted a few passing vehicles slow to look over my campsite, then move on. Sometime later a pickup truck pulled up next to me, the driver asking if I was staying or leaving. He was a hunter looking for a campsite for he and his son, who was to meet him later. We chatted for awhile, then he went a short distance down the side road and set up his camp there. He stopped by again sometime later to chat again and his son happened to drive up as he was there. They soon moved on to their campsite and I did not see them again.
Late in the afternoon, I took my camera into the woods to explore the area.
I had some difficult getting good images during this outing. Part of this might have been due to my thinking that my photographs in the forest were becoming too much alike and in trying to do something different, I was just not very successful. When I got around to reviewing my images from this afternoon, I initially passed over nearly all of them, considering them not worthy of processing. Later, I decided to revisit those images, taking a closer look at each. I still rejected most of them, but I salvaged a few mediocre ones.
Forest Light, Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @24mm, 1/125s, f/11, ISO 200.In the Forest, Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @24mm, 1/160s, f/11, ISO 200.In the Forest, Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @14mm (before crop), 1/125s, f/11, ISO 200.Fallen Aspen leaves on old mossy log.
I walked from my campsite a little after 7AM, going down the utility right of way for a short distance, then ventured into the forest for a morning shoot. A good thing about shooting in a fall forest is that one does not have to be in the woods before daybreak, unless one has a definite location in mind that requires one to be on location at a specific time. It seems that the morning light in a forest can be good from early morning until almost noon, or even later if it is overcast. So just wandering about in the forest looking for photographic opportunities, getting a later than pre-sunrise start is fine.
I’m making so many images of the tree trunks and wide angle forest views, that I’m again thinking that these kind of photographs are getting redundant, so I spend more time looking for little details, like the small, colorful plants on the forest floor that are highlighted by morning sunbeams filtering through the forest.
Fall Forest Floor. Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @ 24mm (before crop), 1/125s, f/11, ISO 1600.
Still I can’t resist getting starbursts (this one is too large and distracting) through the tree trunks
For landscape images it is best to make simple images with no distracting clutter. In a forest it is virtually impossible to avoid clutter. Trees and grasses grow in a mass of seeming disorder. Limbs and twigs stick out everywhere, the forest floor is covered with all kinds of natural debris, grasses and low growing plants, fallen trees and limbs. Still, I try to carefully consider what is in my composition. Sometimes I can exclude something that I consider particularly distracting, many times I just have to accept what is there and try to compose so that a viewer can get the intended message.
Star Burst Aspens. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 26mm, 1/200s, f/11, ISO 200.
Sometimes, isolating details, either via zooming in or cropping in post processing, works to eliminate clutter, but context may be lacking, if that matters.
Aspen Leaves. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/100s, f/11, ISO 250Cradled. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/80s, f/11, ISO 500.Forest Floor and Shadows. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, 1/100s, f/11, ISO 250.
The chaotic nature of a forest may be the message.
