Sangre de Cristo Mountains

 

One of my goals for last year was to work a little harder on my landscape photography, especially during our trip to Colorado. Looking through my photos makes me even more aware how important it is to use the early morning hours or, like with this picture, shoot during the time around sunset and even after sunset.

The shot was made during our stay at Great Sand Dunes National Park, just at the southern park boundaries along a county road. The sun was still up but hidden behind a cloud and it just kissed the 14,000 feet tall peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The Rabbitbrush got enough light to make it stand out from the desert and provided a nice foreground for this scene that lasted only a couple minutes.

Tracks in the sand... 2014

 

The year comes to an end and as always in late December I spend some time cleaning and organizing my photo library. There are always photos that have never seen the public light but they are important to me, and as far I’m concerned deserve to be shown somewhere.

One of the best landscape shootings in 2014 happened on top of the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado one early morning in September. If you missed that story feel free to click HERE and see some of the magic that unfolded during sunrise.

The photo I show you today was made during the ascent to the ridge of the sand dunes. My tracks in the sand left an interesting pattern that inspired me to push the shutter button…

Colorado landscapes: Last call ;-)

 

We did not see the peak of the fall colors in the Rocky Mountains during the first half of the month but with every day during our journey in September we saw the winter coming closer. The first snow on the summits, and finally on our little tent, left no doubt about that winter approaches earlier in the higher altitudes than here in Iowa. Colorado is a very pretty state and I’m certain you can’t go wrong at any time of the year to create some photos or just enjoy the wonderful nature there.

I like to conclude my little photo series about landscape and wildlife in southern and central Colorado with today’s images. I hope you enjoyed it and if someone picked up a tip or two about how to shoot and where to shoot, I will be more than happy. :-) Thank you to all of you, especially my friends on Facebook, who always encouraged me to keep going and publishing a new blog post during the last two months. I really appreciate your support.

Colorado Railroad Museum, part 2

 

A few more about Colorado's railroad heritage...

Colorado wildlife: The Sage Thrasher - a first sighting for us

 

Traveling through bird habitats that are different than what we have here around the Mississippi Valley will necessarily lead to new encounters. The dry sagebrush plaines in the San Luis Valley, not far from Great Sand Dunes National Park, are the ideal place for the Sage Thrasher. There they can find insects, other invertebrates, and berries on the ground and in vegetation.

We saw them on fences, wooden posts, and in the bushes along small irrigation channels in this high-elevation desert. Needless to say that this was a first sighting for us and it took me a while to identify this bird. The Sage Thrasher is the smallest of the thrashers. Generic studies suggest that they are more closely related to the mockingbirds than true thrashers (source: iBird Pro app).

Colorado Railroad Museum, part 1

 

The tip came already some time ago from my German photography friend Maren Arndt. Don’t miss the Railroad Museum in Golden, if you are in this part of Colorado! Well, we finally used the last day of our journey through the southern and central part of Colorado for a visit. The kids were already back in school and so there were not very many visitors beside us. Good for photography in such a place! ;-)

I grew up in Germany traveling by trains that were pulled by steam locomotives. The smell of smoke and coal and the noise of the steam engine are deep in my memories. As a kid I often stood together with my grandpa Willy Stock on a bridge, west of the train station in my home town Bautzen, and we watched the busy traffic in the train yard. I don’t know if this had somehow influenced my decision to become a mechanic, and later a design engineer, but the technical and logistic side of railroads have always fascinated me. Going to the Colorado Railroad Museum stirred up all these good memories and I felt a little like a kid in a candy store…

I could bubble here about the technical aspects to make photos in a museum, but who cares? The bottom line for my style of photography is to keep the elements out of the frame that cry “museum”. I just want my images to tell the story about railroad heritage.

A last word about the people that work or volunteer in the railroad museum. We hear these days a lot about passion, passion in life, passion about photography, you name it. Everybody we had a conversation with in the museum, from the people at the reception desk and in the museum store to the engineers that kept some of the locomotives running, they all had a spark in their eyes, the spark of passion for railroad heritage… Love it!

Colorado landscapes: Maroon Bells

 

One of the most photographed locations in the Rocky Mountains is the view across Maroon Lake to the peaks of the Maroon Bells. And if the sky is blue and a few clouds are in the air you can’t go wrong with this picture. It is a simple click, even with the camera in your phone. If after a day of rain in the valleys the first snow of the season has fallen at higher altitudes and the aspens start turning yellow, you even have a bonus for your image. The wind made a few ripples on the surface of the lake but that didn’t bother me a bit while making this photo. We hiked up to Crater Lake, just below the Maroon Bells, after this photo opportunity. The air was really clear after the rain in the morning, but it got a lot hazier and I didn’t like any of my shots I made up at Crater Lake later in the day…

Colorado wildlife: A favorite critter - the American Pika

 

I have written and presented photos of one of my favorite animals, the American Pika, here in the blog several times during the last few years. If you type ‘pika’ into the search field in the left side bar you can see the older photos and blog posts about this cute and highly interesting critter.

We saw them again this year during a hiking tour in the Maroon Bells- Snowmass Wilderness in the Rocky Mountains. If you cross a boulder-covered hillside above an altitude of 8,000 feet you may have a good chance to hear and eventually see them. The pikas were busy gathering grass and other plants as food for the upcoming winter. I guess they know that there is more than just work in life and sometimes they stop for a few minutes and take a sun bath or just watch what’s going on in their rocky neighborhood.

I have quite a few images of the American Pika on my hard drive already but still missed “the” shot that tells the story about their preparation for the winter. It is not so difficult to make the click while the pika takes a break and looks down from a rock, but if they have the mouth full of plants and grass they move darn fast between the boulders. Because of the rocks it is not so easy to follow them with the lens and track focus. Peak of action, the short stops the pika makes sometime on its way to the den was again the key for success.

I got the shot I went after this time but I know there is still room for improvement. Sharpness is not 100 percent nailed and the photo is slightly cropped. I was closer with the Nikon D300s / Sigma 150, f2.8 combo for the second image and it is definitely a tad sharper. The question is always, which photo tells the better story? For me it’s the first one despite the little technical flaws…

Colorado landscapes: Aspen (no, not the city... ;-) )

 

Hey, I’m back. A busy travel schedule during the last couple weeks kept me away from any photography work. I still like to show you a few more photos from our trip to Colorado in September.

We were a little early for the peak of the autumn colors, the aspens just started turning yellow. But we kept our eyes open for locations with some color and good texture in the timber. As soon the light touches a scene like this you have your shot, a photo that tells the story of the changing season in the Rocky Mountains.

Another interesting subject for a nature photographer can be the tall and mostly straight stems of the aspens. Their light color in combination with a subtle light and a dark background always appealed to me. I like the graphic impact of the staggered arrangement and the rich texture of the bark and grass in the foreground.

While making the photo I already had a black and white image in mind. As always when it comes to black and white, the post processing was done with NIK Silver Efex Pro.

Colorado landscapes: Maroon Creek

 

It is sometimes easy to get carried away by the great views the Rocky Mountains have to offer. Nevertheless it is always worth to have the eyes on the ground and search for the smaller spots that can make for a good photo. This is in particular true when clouds hide the “classic views” most people are looking for. Maroon Creek, just below Maroon Lake, has a lot of interesting places that are often ignored by visitors but that are just great during these days with heavy overcast.

I learned over time to approach scenes like this with some deliberation and some time at hands. In the past I have rushed through quite often in similar situations and later at home, in front of the computer, much time was spent to correct the perspective by cropping the image and by removing unwanted branches and sticks that stuck into the frame from all sides. Don’t take me wrong, I still do small cosmetic corrections on my landscape photos, like “border police” around the edges, but I reach my goal to do it right in camera a lot more often with this slower approach.