Minutes before sunrise, first light strikes the stunning escarpment along the eastern face of the Snowy Range and reflects in the beautiful calm waters of Lake Marie, in the Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming.

I've been fascinated from afar with the Snowy Range for quite a few years now, but hadn't made it there until we took an extra day and headed that way last month after fighting the crowds in Rocky Mountain National Park for a couple of days.

What we found in this part of the Medicine Bow was even more awesome than I'd hoped. It's one of those places that's actually very accessible, but has the appealing, uncrowded feel and wonder of a far more remote location. A great trail system (that I need to explore much further) weaves among and between the stunning alpine lakes, meadows and rockfalls nestled beneath the soaring cliffs and quartzite mountains.

And speaking of quartzite, I'm not sure I've ever seen so much in one place. The Snowy Range is aptly named, not just because it gets a lot of snow in winter, but also because there is so much quartz in its exposed rocks that it appears almost snow-capped year round in many lighting conditions. Beneath the higher peaks, boulder fields of bright quartz blends scatter here and there among blue waters, firs and autumn-toned undergrowth. A beautiful and fascinating place.

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Tags:   Medicine Bow National Forest Snowy Range Wyoming Centennial Lake Marie Reflection Nikon Landscape Beautiful photobenedict Sunrise Dawn Morning Light Alpenglow Reflections Mountain Alpine Tarn Quartz Quartzite Rocks Cliff Mountains Autumn Lake Forest Cliffs Fall Shore

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Faulted, uplifted, fractured, eroded and tumbled down, the Alabama Hills provide quite a compelling landscape accented with warm dawn light at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, near Lone Pine, California.

Josh and I drove over to the Alabama Hills the day before this shot was taken only to find the area fairly socked in with textureless clouds, and with a larger and unfortunately visually uninteresting storm bearing down as the day progressed. We used that time to scout around a fair bit, marveling at the jumbled rocky landscape and imagining how grand the scene could be if the clouds parted in the morning to reveal sunrise light on the great mountains rising behind this interesting foreground.

And during those scouting efforts over the wider area around Lone Pine, I have to admit we almost got our not-nearly-high-enough clearance rental vehicle seriously hung up on a rocky dirt road a good ways higher in the foothills above Manazar that afternoon as the whipping wind signaled the storms' arrival. But that's a story for another day, or perhaps not at all, since it reveals some less than stellar decision making on our part given the obvious limitations of the vehicle we had (wouldn't have been any problem at all with a high-clearance 4WD of course). Funny thing is that, since we didn't end up wrecking the thing, we'll probably end up remembering wrestling with that one stretch of road longer than most anything else from our trip this past winter.

Anyway, nature steered our focus in another direction for a while the next morning at sunrise as an unrelenting series of cloud patches moved in from the north, each advancing and passing very quickly, but still on the whole obscuring the Sierra peaks during most of the best sunrise light. An impediment can just as well be inspiration for a different approach, however, so we shifted much of our attention to using the Alabama Hills as the primary scene element rather than foreground for images highlighting the jagged forms of the Sierra ridges and peaks beyond.

When I took this shot, that torrent of fast moving cloud banks had wholly obscured everything above the top of the frame here, but I thought it was beautiful how vibrant sunrise light darted under the clouds for a few moments here to alight on some of the Alabama Hills' interesting features and the lower slopes and crags of the mountains beyond.

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Tags:   Alabama Hills 395 Lone Pine California Nikon Nikkor Landscape Mount Whitney photobenedict Lone Pine Peak Mt. Whitney Sierra Nevada Manzanar Sunrise Rocks Rocky Boulders Crags Clouds Peaks Ridges Hills Slopes Scree Fields Boulder Erosion Eroded Cloudy Wisps Mood High Sierra Dawn Inyo National Forest Eastern Sierra Soft Subtle Light Sierra Crest Morning

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Long planted rows of poplars in peak autumn brilliance appear to form a perfect passage toward the distant light of cleared fields under clouded skies, while the trees to each side appear almost to wall off all else in the world including the sad recognition that these trees would soon be no more, near Boardman, Oregon.

As you might imagine, I couldn't help but think of Frost's beloved work as I strolled through this yellow wood, rustling freshly fallen leaves with each step. From this perspective, no paths diverge, but take a few steps any which way and similar geometries repeat in different directions to reveal almost innumerable apparent paths--most with no obvious indication of which would be best. So I chose this path, illusion though it may be, and in "ages hence" I may well even try to convince myself it was "the one less traveled by". Either way, it is one of my favorite simple images from a trip a couple of years ago to see the Boardman Tree Farm at its autumn best before the last of these glorious trees were felled.

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Tags:   Boardman Oregon Tree Farm Autumn Fall Gold Golden Color Poplar Aspen Nikon Nikkor Landscape photobenedict Geometry Rows Alignment Sunrise Morning Dawn Yellow Aspens Poplars Hermiston Forest Trees Tree Farm Beautiful Gilded Passage Geometries Leaves Planted Lost Mysterious Mood Nature Dappled Light Peaceful Wood Quiet Autumnal Serene

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Hints of autumn yellow begin to appear in the unlikely trees found along the Virgin River's narrowly confined course almost one thousand feet below the canyon rim in Zion National Park, Utah.

This is an image is from my first, and so far only, hike through the Narrows nearly four years ago on a beautiful autumn day in Zion. I often struggle even more than usual with photographing new types of terrain and conditions when I first experience them, and this initial visit to the Narrows was no exception. The contrasts in these narrow canyons are extreme (note the bright orange of the more distant canyon wall receiving direct sunlight); the motion of the water is delightful but also the enemy of maintaining stability; and eddies of air flow twist their way though the slot canyon's gnarled turns to brush the leaves of the scattered trees that find a home in these sheltered recesses.

I was inspired to look back at a few archive images from this past trip by my recent wishful thinking discussions with Josh Krasner that it might be time to head back to Zion's Narrows sometime soon. And looking back has in turn given me extra inspiration to try to make the trip again at the next available opportunity, this time hopefully to do better with the camera to go along with what I'm sure will again be the amazing sensation of hiking between the towering, colorful canyon walls rising up to each side so close as to seem almost joined overhead in many places.

I note that in my images from this trip, as well as some from other slot canyons I've hiked (those with an active rivers or streams flowing within), I find that the blue hues in the shadowed water show up in accentuated tones both in my source RAW images and also in my reference JPEGs, particularly when shot with a bit longer exposure. I desaturated the blue in this image a fair bit from its initial appearance when beginning to process my RAW file here, but I confess to liking the blue hues enough that I decided not to remove them further--at least for now.

While the camera may see hues a little differently than the eye sometimes, one thing the human eye (and brain) is good at in low light is personifying the inanimate natural world and sometimes perceiving slightly ominous forms in the simplest shapes and shadows of nature. As we worked our way though this section of the Narrows, I remember thinking that the dark lower canyon walls (visible in the upper right center of the frame here) looked vaguely and spookily from certain angles like the skull of a giant ancient hominid partly embedded in the sandstone!

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Tags:   Zion National Park Narrows Springdale Utah Slot Canyon Nikon Nikkor Landscape photobenedict Autumn Fall Virgin River Stream River Gorge Trees Beautiful Color Rocks Sandstone Eroded Erosion Long Exposure Colorful Tree Hike Water Travel Southwest

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The early prominences of a strong auroral display light up the dark winter skies above a stark volcanic and snow dusted landscape near Hornafjordur, Iceland.

After shooting until after the last light of blue hour at Vestrahorn, we headed into Hofn for a delicious dinner of langoustines and other local Icelandic specialties. The skies were mostly clear and the aurora forecast for later in the evening looked very promising so we watched our phones almost obsessively for alerts that activity could be beginning just outside. We were just finishing our meals when the Met Office's aurora page showed the activity level jumping up to Kp5, and then Kp6, which we understood loosely to indicate that something of a geomagnetic storm was beginning!

We hastily paid our bill and rushed out into the street, elated immediately to see shimmering veils of light dancing across the heavens above the village rooftops. At this first glimpse, the light color was still mostly white with only hints of green visible to naked eyes. We jumped in the car and drove out of town a few kilometers, watching the aurora seeming to increase in strength with each passing minute. More color (richer yellow-greens and touches of red) became plainly visible, and not knowing how long the display would last, we decided just to pull off the road at a random location where we could see some texture in the adjacent field leading toward more distant mountains crowned with whirling auroras.

While I had been fortunate enough to experience an auroral display before, I had almost no useful experience trying to photograph this wondrous phenomenon, so there was more than a little trial and error as I tried to focus and hone in on settings that worked reasonably well even as the strength, structure and location of the main display rapidly evolved. An additional variable was soon introduced when another car pulled off across the road a short distance from us, and left its tail lights shining enough to light some of the snow in the foreground of my composition here. I thought about removing that aberrant foreground light from this image, but given that there were some red hues in the aurora, I sort of came to appreciate the balance provided by the touches of reddish light hitting the ridges in that snowy field.

It turned out that nature had much more in store for us this evening than a quick, roadside view of the aurora. I've already posted a couple of images from later that same night when the aurora was even stronger, and its form even more amazing, but I felt like posting this as sort of a prequel, or origin story, before I get back around to posting some more of my later images (from different locations) of this stunning night-long celestial display.

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Tags:   Aurora Borealis Northern Lights Hofn Iceland Beautiful Nikon Landscape photobenedict Green Night Mountains Vestrahorn Stokkesnes Glacier Frozen Lake Ice Iceberg Coast Ocean Winter Arctic Mountain Volcano

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