Crested Butte, Colorado thumbnails only

A high priority for my fall photo trip to Colorado was to capture the beauty of aspen tree trunks. There is little challenge to finding an aspen grove in Crested Butte. Aspen trees, with their beautiful white (or gray) trunks, are the predominant flora in the 10+ miles west of the small ski town of Crested Butte, through Kebler Pass and beyond. The big challenge is finding the right grove of trees to create ordered complexity in an image.
 
Of the thousands of trees observed in this area, I found some of the most-photographically-cooperative at a strong curve in the road just east of Kebler Pass. Especially missing at this location were the deadfalls that are so common and interfere with the vertical lines I wanted to emphasize.
 
For this image, I wanted the viewer to feel like they were part of the scene. I attempt to convey that feeling by moving in close to a large, featured foreground tree and using a moderately wide angle focal length. This location allowed one aspen tree trunk to become large in the frame while a couple of other clumps of trunks staggered into a great mass of trunks filling most of the background. All of this while the camera remained level, keeping even the tree trunks in the border of the frame parallel with the sides of the frame.
 
The 31mm focal length was wide enough to allow everything in the frame to stay sharp at f/11, yet not so wide that the background trees became tiny. Cloud cover reduced the contrast, evening out the light on this scene. A complete lack of wind (something I'm not used to at high elevations) allowed for sharp foliage even with the .8 second exposure. The yellow-green foliage color requires a late Sep or early Oct-timed visit to this location.

It was an early morning in Crested Butte, Colorado and the sky was dark, heavily overcast and quite uninspiring. Then the clouds rolled away and suddenly there was bright light bringing life to the fall-colored aspens.

I was primarily shooting with the Canon EOS R and RF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM Lens this morning. As there was adequate light, shooting this combination handheld permitted rapid and significant location and composition changes as dictated by the rapidly changing light.

I love photographing white-tailed deer in fields, where it is easy to find a clean background, foreground obstructions are greatly reduced, and lighting is unhindered. While shooting in the woods adds complication to the composition, that increased challenge brings the opportunity for uncommon results.

On this day, the fog and rain added uniqueness, reducing background distractions and ensuring that lighting was good at all angles. While this gnarly antlered buck was tearing up a tree, I moved into a position that provided blurred trees to frame the buck and rubbed tree.

The Canon RF 600mm F4 L IS USM Lens is my go-to wildlife lens, but finding a clear line of sight for the long subject distance it requires can become problematic in a thick forest. With increasing frequency, I'm carrying the Canon RF 400mm F2.8 L IS USM Lens into the woods.

While this buck was not moving fast, high-speed continuous shooting was still helpful at times, including for avoiding raindrops over eyes.

Speaking of raindrops and eyes, the EOS R1, including the viewfinder, was quite wet. Still, Eye Control AF continued to work impressively well. An occasional wipe was needed when the drops in the viewfinder became large, but I heavily relied on the Eye Control AF feature the entire day and trip.