We'd planned on buying
Zak a plane ticket to go back to Colorado over winter break to go snowboarding with some of his old friends. When
Danelle reminded me that I had no plans for winter break, the one-person plan trip turned into a two-man road trip!
No sense wasting precious time or daylight, so it was up before dawn on our first day to shoot at my old stomping grounds of
Chatfield State Park.
I tend to be hyper-focused on capturing the moment when the sun breaks the horizon -- either in the morning or evening -- and miss out on the beauty of twilight. You typically start seeing color in the sky as much as an hour before sunrise or after sunset. This time, I got it right.
Of course, that horizon-breaking moment still has its own special appeal. With almost no clouds, I got creative with foreground elements to avoid having just a gradation of blue at the top of the image.
It was frigid that morning -- like, single-digit cold. With relatively little moisture in the dry air the naked trees only had a small amount of frost on their branches.
Aside from a few magpies, I saw no wildlife to speak of. They clearly had enough sense not to get up and about until things warmed up a little more. Still, the stark winter landscape provided plenty of visual interest. Getting close to some dormant
rabbitbrush yielded an abstract sort of scene ...
... while backing up and zooming out resulted in more context.
One of my favorite tricks with a relatively bleak scene is to take the color completely out and let light and contrast do the heavy lifting. I like the result of that approach here with the tree and frost.
I only spent about an hour out because I had to get Zak up to the mountains. But given how long it had been since I'd experienced cold temperatures like those an hour was plenty.
More to come. MUCH more!
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