Two months after I retired, I took a trip with a couple of friends to photograph Colorado. One of the iconic photo-ops in that state is the Maroon Bells Mountain peaks at sunrise that you see above. The sunrise lighting up the top of the mountain is the prize at this location. Many photographers compete for space along the lake shore to get the “best” perspective of this event.
The next photo below gives you some idea of the crowd size, even though I took this pic 30 minutes after the one above, when the crowd was even thicker.
I do like the so-called sunrise shot, but that scene also makes me feel separate from what I’m looking at. The mountains and lake looked huge, vast, and by comparison I felt so small and distant from it. I walked around the lakes edge until I found a different perspective. I like to capture more of the ground in front of me. It makes me feel more like I was there, and that I could walk into the photograph, the Aspen Stepping Stones.
I want to acknowledge my friend, Steve Ornberg—a master at photography trip planning, and an excellent landscape photographer. Steve has since gone on to concentrate on astro-photography and bird photography.
