Peak to Peak Highway 2011

Good things sometimes come from being on e-mail lists. Not often, but sometimes. This past Wednesday was one of those times. I got a message from Mike's Camera about a Fall Colors workshop they were holding on Saturday. Four hours for just $60 led by photographer Charles Steinberg. So up to Boulder I drove, where I joined 30 other shutterbugs on a bus headed to a trail off the Peak to Peak Highway just north of Nederland.

It was nice thinking about how and why I shoot the pictures I do, and being challenged to justify all my choices for perspective, composition, aperture setting, exposure and so on.

The clouds had rolled in by the time we got to our location, which depressed me at first until I looked at it as an opportunity to figure out how to still find and take good pictures when the lighting conditions weren't exactly what I wanted them to be.

It's a little ironic to me that the focus of the trip was really on the golden aspens, yet this ended up being one of my favorite pictures from the outing where the aspens contribute almost nothing to it. I like the lone evergreen trying to grow on a rocky outcropping, the splash of red from the vegetation in the foreground, the texture of the clouds, the touch of blue sky and the bonus bird flying through the scene.

The sun did peek through the clouds for a little while, and I was able to take decent advantage of it.

My camera has a white balance setting of "Cloudy" for a reason. Who knew?

Our instructor challenged us to try and get a shot that captured the "quaking" behavior of aspen leaves. I thought this was my best effort.

The mix of green and gold leaves on a single plant was striking to me...

...as was this view of golden leaves against one of our few patches of blue sky.

I liked these burnt pine cones a lot, but didn't get the exact background I was looking for. Didn't get the pine cones as sharp as I wanted, either.

It was inevitable that I'd find a dead tree to shoot. :)

I got down on my belly to get the right perspective for this shot with red, gold and a touch of green all in it. Right after I snapped it a dog came trotting by and made me jump. While we are all laughing at that, the dog stopped a couple of feet away and marked a tree. So I guess things could have gone worse for me.

We shot for about 90 minutes and really had a good time doing it. There's a follow-up critique on Thursday that I'm unfortunately not going to be able to make, but I feel like I definitely got my money's worth from Saturday alone. I'll definitely be looking for more Mike's workshops in the future!