On the morning of our third day in Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, my oldest son and I returned to the Yampa River and the nearby grassy meadow for our final photography shoot before packing up and heading back to Denver.
We again went onto the bar in the river channel just east of the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers to shoot in the pre-sunrise and sunrise light.
I made compositions similar to those of the previous day’s sunset shoot, capturing the morning sky, the canyon walls and reflections of those in the river.
Clouds moved across the sky as the light changed. I shot towards the east and the rising sun, then made a few images toward the west.
I turned again to the east and north as the sky and clouds became brighter, which created more contrast in the images and brighter reflections in the river.
As the sun rose behind the canyon walls, the clouds became brighter and more colorful.
After shooting in the river channel, we climbed back onto the meadow and made more images as the morning light advanced across the sky. The moon transited across the sky to the south as we shot.
Today, rather than using rocks in the meadow as foreground objects, I put tall clumps of grass in the foreground.
Shooting with the wide angle lens results in distortion, some of which can be taken out, but not all of it. Note how the rock outcrop on the right side of this image appears to be tilted in towards the middle of the image. Trying to take out this tilt with the tools in Adobe Lightroom will affect the rest of the image in an undesirable manner.
There were a few scattered thistles in this meadow and I used one as a foreground object.
The first of the sunrise rays began to show up on the top of the large rock outcrop on the east side of the meadow
and a little later on the rock outcrop on the west side.
We were fortunate to have scattered clouds this morning to add interest to the sky.
This wraps up the highlights of my July 2019 Colorado road trip,
Ken
