A landscape photographer's tour

Keith's travels in Colorado - April-May 2006

In 2004 Keith first took his then fairly new Canon 1Ds on a driving tour round the Rockies in the USA.

This photo-diary covers a second driving trip around Colorado in April/May 2006.

There are lots of excellent photo books by people who've had a bit more time to look round than I have, such as this one by John Fielder... (lots of places I didn't get to)

This collection of photos and comments has been re-written to make it easier to follow than the original (big) web page.

On my return to the UK, I wrote a more technical article about the photographic aspects as a follow up to my original "Keith's first all digital visit to the Rockies"

There are other photo travel diaries covering trips to:
Washington and Oregon in September/October 2007 and California/Oregon in April/May 2007

Note for visitors from Colorado - I had a great time, thanks! I do really like the place :-)

	Daily pages 27th April London-Denver 28th April South park 29th April Leadville 30th April Aspen 1st May Aspen 2nd May Steamboat Springs 3rd May Steamboat Springs 4th May Steamboat Springs 5th May Delta 6th May Gunnison 7th May Gunnison 8th May Gunnison 9th May Fairplay 10th May Pikes Peak and back to Denver
What's the weather like? National Weather Service radar	Webcams What are the roads like?

Steamboat (2)

A damp grey day - not the best to inspire me to go and take pictures :-)

Anyway, I decided to drive a few miles north to Steamboat Lake where the rain turned to sleet...

Sometimes overcast conditions can bring out quite subtle colours, such as the picture at the start of the South Park section. Although the aspens near Steamboat have that spring flush of yellow/green, the ones up here still look quite stark.

muted colours

Muted colours

I took several pictures at this spot, and I'll be curious to see how they work out as large prints, where all the fine detail will be visible. The saturation has not been altered in the conversion. Whilst it is good to check out pictures on the same day, I'm always aware that I'm only working on a laptop and my appreciation of what will work as a print may well change when I'm back home. It's another reason I like to shoot more pictures - disk space and memory cards are relatively cheap, compared to wishing I'd tried a different angle.

spring aspens 2

Spring Aspens 2

On the drive up I saw this superb example of a roadside sign.

warning sign

It's blurred, since I was in my car and it was raining. I could have got out, but you never know how someone who puts up a sign like this is going to react to an Englishman with a long telephoto lens. :-)

Perhaps, someone unaware of his country's involvement at the 1944 meeting at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. -- perhaps, someone not overly aware of a lot of things. :-)

By lunchtime it had brightened up a bit, so I decided to go to Fish Creek falls, which is just a few miles outside of Steamboat Springs.

Walking up to the falls I spotted this bird trying to look inconspicuous amongst some spring flowers

bird and flowers

Spring flowers

Given the amount of work that went into producing this particular B/W picture of the falls, I'll leave it in the article :-)

The lighting is better than this morning, where the sunlight was a bit hazy.

Thanks to one of the other visitors to the falls, I've this picture of myself at the bridge where the other photo was taken.

Keith at fish creek falls

Notice how much 'flatter' the falls look without the good sunlight.

Hopefully we'll see a bit of sun while I'm here...

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