The Artful Engineer

My wife and I are on a mission to see the entire state of Colorado. This isn’t happening at a breakneck pace, mind you, but we are making steady progress. Whenever we drive somewhere new we color in the roads with a pink highlighter on our rather beat-up paper Colorado map. At this point, there are fewer and fewer candidates close to our home, so we have taken to staying somewhere for a few nights and exploring that area. This time around, Alamosa was our base camp.

It was late for fall color in most of Colorado, but we ventured south towards the New Mexico border and found some nice stands of aspens in bright yellow. It was obviously a little late here, too, as is clear from the bare aspens in all of these pictures. The yellow trees here are the late-turning ones; I imagine a week earlier most of the bare trees would have been yellow and the yellow ones more of a light green. Both have their merits, but I do like the color palette I ended up with of yellow, dark green, and light gray.

I do like the pattern in this next image, but the light is harsher than in the others. There is undoubtedly a way to soften it a bit in post-processing, but I am not sure that it has enough promise to merit a lot of extra work.

The three earlier images and the next one were all taken with a long zoom. This helped me thread the needle between trees that were close to road. It also helped me keep the sky out of the image—I have nothing against the sky generally, but in most of these cases it was just bright and distracting.

Of the four images above, the first one is definitely my favorite because it has a really nice spotlight on the aspens in the lower half of the image. This gives it some depth (even at 400mm) that the others lack. The following two images mix things up a bit, filling the frame with bright aspen leaves. This first image is the more standard yellow aspen leaves. The two foreground trees are relatively small and backlit by the sun, so their leaves are bright gold against the darker yellow of the shadowed side of the larger aspens behind them. The dark trunks and branches also give the image some compositional structure:

The vast majority of aspens turn yellow, but occasionally they turn orange or red, like this densely-packed group here:

This image is front-lit and it is very difficult to see the trunks as in the previous image. It is really just a mass of color and texture—not much to speak of in terms of composition, but I do think an image like this does add something to the group as a whole.