Here is an image of fall colors right before we got hit with the heavy snow:

The photograph was taken with the Nikon D7000 and Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G lens, without any filters. Actually, I could not use a filter, because the image was shot as a panorama (24 vertical images). As I have explained in my “how to photograph panoramas” article, using filters while photographing panoramas is a bad idea. Although the lighting conditions were ideal with the sun directly behind me, I was actually surprised by how the D7000 captured the scene. Its dynamic range is indeed very impressive and it just makes very colorful and beautiful images.

Post-processing in Photoshop took me about 5 minutes after stitching the image. I first started out by cropping the stitched image, then brightened up the shadows a little and adjusted the levels. Sharpened it up by around 40% in Nik’s Sharpener Pro, then saved and closed the image. The image popped up in Lightroom, I then increased the clarity a little to bring out the clouds and the trees, then exported from Lightroom at 80% resolution, adding our watermark using the same technique described in my “how to watermark a photo in Lightroom” article.

I will be leading my group in Boulder, CO on Sunday, October 2. If we have the same attendance level as last year, the walk will be full pretty soon, so sign up while there is availability (the Photo Walk is 100% free). I have not had a chance to fully plan the day yet, but it will be a lot of fun for sure and we should capture some beautiful shots with some fall foliage. We will be around the Pearl Street Mall area and we will dine at one of the restaurants there. More details will be posted on our Boulder Photo Walk page.

Why should you sign up for the Photo Walk? See my “Reasons to join the Worldwide Photo Walk” article I posted last year. If you cannot sign up for my photo walk, find another one close to you and join. If you cannot find one, then sign up to be a photo walk leader and invite your photographer friends!

See the winning photographs from the last year walk here.

Here is a photo of our group in downtown Denver last year:

May 29 – Introduction to Photography

Location and time: Roxborough State Park, May 29 @ 9 AM
Update: We are meeting in the parking lot of the park
1. The Exposure Triangle (Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO) and White Balance
2. Introduction to DSLR cameras and lenses
3. Camera modes and how to shoot in manual mode
4. Metering modes and exposure compensation
5. Autofocus and manual focus operation
6. Taking sharp photos
7. Shutter speed and creative photography
8. Shooting scenarios (portraits, landscapes, action, etc)
9. Basics of composition
10. Depth of field and bokeh

Note: you will be responsible for paying $6 entrance fee (state park fee) at the entrance station. Please bring plenty of water and snacks, since no breakfast or lunch will be provided.

June 11 – Landscape Photography

Location and time: Rocky Mountain National Park, June 11 @ 11 AM
Update: We are meeting in front of the Historic Park Theatre in Estes Park at 11 AM sharp
1. Introduction to Landscape Photography
2. Camera gear – cameras, lenses and tripods
3. Exposure and camera settings
4. Filters and filter systems
5. Composition
6. Shooting scenarios (waterfalls, streams, sunrise & sunset, night photography, etc)
7. Weather and timing
8. Focusing and depth of field

Note: you will be responsible for paying $20 entrance fee per vehicle (national park fee) at the entrance station. It might be a good idea to carpool with others. Please bring plenty of water and lunch, since food will not be provided.

June 12 – Portrait and Wedding Photography

Location and time: Hilton Garden Inn Cherry Creek, Bing Room, June 12 @ 9 AM
Update: Please find out from front desk where the Bing Room is – we are meeting there at 9 AM sharp
1. Introduction to portrait and wedding photography
2. Camera gear – cameras and lenses
3. Exposure and camera settings
4. Posing and composition
5. Capturing the moments
6. Depth of field and bokeh
7. Using filters for portraiture
8. Shooting outside
9. Shooting indoors
10. Flash photography basics
11. On-camera and off-camera flash (speedlights)
12. Shooting in dim/dark environments with flash
13. Post-processing basics

Note: the hotel has a good restaurant (Zink), so we will have our lunch there. You will be responsible for paying for your own meal.

June 18 – Flash Photography

Location and time: Doubletree Denver Tech Center, Teal Meeting Room, June 18 @ 9 AM
1. Introduction to flash photography
2. Introduction to Nikon and Canon speedlights
3. Flash gear – reflectors, umbrellas, softboxes, flashes, etc
4. Working in TTL mode
5. Working in Manual mode
6. Wireless flash triggers (IR and radio)
7. On-camera and off-camera flash (speedlights)
8. Off-camera flash with studio strobes
9. Using flash indoors and outdoors
10. Creating beautiful portraits with flash
11. Balancing ambient light and flash
12. Using gels to correct white balance and color

Note: the hotel has a good restaurant (Zink), so we will have our lunch there. You will be responsible for paying for your own meal.

Please note that you should bring a DSLR camera with you if you want to take the full advantage of the workshop. You are welcome to join if you do not have one yet, but I recommend to only participate in the “Introduction to Photography” workshop – the rest of the workshops are designed specifically for DSLR camera owners.

Each class should take between 3-4 hours of lecture time and several hours of practice time with mini FAQ and Q&A sessions in between. For the portrait and flash photography class, we will do our best to bring a model. The hotel for portrait and flash photography classes (Doubletree DTC) is not finalized yet and is subject to change. This post will be updated with the latest information as soon as I have it.

HOW TO SIGN UP FOR THE WORKSHOPS

To sign up for a workshop, please leave a comment below with the workshop name and date you are interested in. You will need to leave your email address and name in the comment field, so that I can get you on a temporary mailing list. Your email address will not be published anywhere.

After taking a long break, I’m now back to posting as usual. Currently finishing up: “indoors flash photography using off-camera flash” and tomorrow will be hopefully posting two new articles – “how to take portraits indoors with a Christmas tree” and “how to photograph a lunar eclipse” (yes, info on how the above image was taken will also be posted in detail). Stay tuned!

1) Aspens 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper

2) Yellowstone Lake 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper

If you are looking for information on how the above images were taken, check out the first two links on the top of the page, along with the Landscape Photography Tips I posted a few days ago.

Enjoy!

Maroon Bells is truly magical, the one place you can only appreciate when you are there. While photographs do show the beauty of Maroon Bells, they still cannot transfer the raw beauty of the place with its high altitude fresh air, the smell of wildflowers and plants, pleasant afternoon breezes, the ever-changing weather and freezing-cold nights and mornings. Maroon Bells changes drastically during seasons. In the spring (which is around late April and May), the water level of the Maroon Lake is high, the aspens have new leaves, with wildflowers and plants just starting to turn green. The summer is beautiful, with the busy streams and gorgeous wildflowers. The fall season is what draws the most amount of people to Maroon Bells, due to aspens rapidly changing their colors. If you are lucky, you might get some snow with aspens in their fall plumage. Winters are rather harsh, but still beautiful with fresh snow. The roads in winter are closed though, so you would have to rent a snowmobile to get to the lake. In terms of seasons, I personally like to visit Maroon Bells from mid-July to late September.

Fall weekends are typically very busy and if you do not show up two to three hours earlier, you might not find any available parking. If you want to go there in the fall, I would go there Monday through Wednesday – those are the least busy days. Starting from Thursday, it gets pretty packed with all local amateur photographers taking time-off to photograph the surrounding area and San Juan Mountains.

What about time of the day? You want to be there long before sunrise. Don’t show up 30 minutes before sunrise, because you will not find any good spots. If you want to find closer parking and get a good spot to photograph from, you want to be there at least an hour to two hours earlier. Wondering how bad it gets? Take a look at this picture:

And that was not even a busy day! Here is an example of a busy day:

Mind you, this is the last spot on the right side of the lake – there was no place for me to stand anywhere else and photographers were literally standing shoulder to shoulder, tripod into tripod. Why? Because they know the sunrise is what creates the most magical photographs. When you stand facing the Maroon Bells, the sun appears behind you, with the first rays of light hitting the top of the mountain:

After taking sunrise pictures, I would stick around for at least another two hours to photograph the place when the sun is higher:

Late afternoons and sunsets are not good to photograph Maroon Bells, because the light is going to be directly in front of you. If you arrive at night and the sky is clear with a full moon, you might want to try taking a picture or two at night:

But it will require some good technique and preferably fast glass + good high-ISO performance by your camera, if you do not want to see star trails.

If you are looking for a guide on how to photograph landscapes, check out my landscape photography tips.

Hope this helps. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions.

And here is the link to download the wallpaper:

Maroon Bells 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper

Enjoy!

Let me start off with my favorite image of the second part of the trip that I captured at Maroon Bells in Aspen (image as is, no post-processing):

Can you believe I captured this at 12:30 AM at night? After I took some shots at night during our trip to Mesa Verde, I could not wait to get another clear night to take some pictures. This time, we were at Maroon Bells – the perfect photography spot. We arrived at around 12 AM in the morning and it was so cold outside, that Sergey refused to get out of the car to take pictures. Plus, he thought that it would be a waste of time and energy to try to shoot at night and he was certain that none of the pictures would come out good. I told him about the images I took at Mesa Verde at night, and he finally agreed to come with me to the lake to take a few pictures.

As soon as he saw the first image on his camera, he could not believe his eyes. The moonlight was so bright that all fall colors were visible and the perfect reflection also added to the scenery. Sergey was shooting with his Canon 60D DSLR and I was shooting with my Nikon D3s. Neither Sergey nor I felt like standing in front of our cameras for hours to capture star trails, so we mostly took 15-30 second exposures in order to get the stars look like stars instead of a bunch of lines. Typically, even a 30 second exposure for an ultra-wide angle lens is too long (the above image was shot @ 30s), so I generally try to stay between 10-20 seconds. The speed of the lens also plays a huge role when doing night photography – fast-aperture prime lenses with good wide open performance typically yield the best results. Unfortunately, I did not have any fast primes with me, so I had to shoot with my 24-70mm that is not very good at the edges when shooting wide open. To get slightly better corner results, I stopped it down to f/3.2 @ 28mm focal length.

That night was also the night when I messed up an important setting on my camera – image quality. Since I had my gloves on, I kept on moving ISO from one value to another on the back of the camera and accidentally hit the “Quality” button (which is near the ISO button) and moved the rear dial. This is my first complaint about the D3s – why did Nikon decide to put the Quality setting right next to ISO?! It is not one of those settings that you would normally touch… At that point, I had no idea that I changed anything on the camera and I kept on shooting…

As I have stated in some of my posts from before, Maroon Bells attracts hundreds of photographers from all over the world. Here is a typical non-busy morning at Maroon Bells. On a good day, photographers stand shoulder by shoulder, tripod into tripod. Sergey and I once almost left because we could not find a spot.

When you shoot RAW and all of a sudden end up in the 8-bit JPEG/TIFF realm, you suddenly realize how important it is to shoot RAW instead of JPEG. The dark part of the image on the left is practically impossible to recover…

Aspens were beautiful as always. One thing about the sun in the frame, you have to be careful about how you place it in your frame. Often times, if you put the sun at a certain angle, lots of flare and ghosting will completely ruin your images. Another thing to watch out for, is filters – either use high quality filters or remove them completely, since they could add more flare/ghosts to your images.

I have never hiked to Clear Lake, which is right under the Maroon Bells basin. It is only 2 miles away from the parking lot (moderate hike), but certainly worth a visit – except not in the fall. As you can see, the lake was almost dry with not much to see around it. I did not bother taking pictures except this one just to show what it looks like at this time of the year:

After a somewhat tiring hike to the Clear Lake, we ate lunch and then headed out to Dallas Divide near Ridgway, CO. We arrived there at around sunset and only managed to take a couple of pictures of Mount Sneffels. The peaks this time had some snow on them, but the haze was horrible. I used a polarizing filter to get rid of the haze, but obviously could not completely get rid of it:

Our next morning was certainly unproductive, since we had no idea where we needed to be at sunrise. We drove around by ranches and took pictures:

Again, these were captured in 8-bit TIFF, so they are basically as-is, directly out of the camera.

More mountains with fences:

And plenty of roads:

As we drove around taking pictures, I found a field with lots of odd-looking flowers:

Not sure what it is, does anyone know?

Our next stop was at an old mine that is accessible by a 4×4 road. It was an easy drive that gave us some opportunities to take pictures of the mine with the fall colors:

As we started taking pictures, my camera showed that I ran out of memory. I could not understand what was going on, since I knew that I did not take so many pictures to fill up two 16 GB cards. I then looked at the camera settings and realized that I had been shooting TIFF all this time…how stupid of me! Out of around 1,200 images I shot with Sergey, around 1,000+ were in TIFF format. What a waste! I obviously switched back to RAW, but it was already too late.

Thankfully, I do have some good images that were taken well and do not need to be touched in Lightroom or Photoshop. However, it is still crazy that I did not even bother looking at the camera settings for two days, thinking that I was shooting RAW all that time…

I took a couple of images of the above building with the background peak and scenery, but it was too boring. I then saw some guy walk towards the building, so I patiently waited and then took a shot.

Here is the Yankee Girl Mine up close:

Don’t remember the name of this building, but it was on our way out:

After our night photography success at Maroon Bells, Sergey did not mind to take some more pictures at night. We returned to one of the lakes we took pictures of during the day and set up our cameras on tripods. Milky Way was beautiful as always, with the snowy mountains and vegetation getting plenty of light from the Moon:

I obviously could not resist to take some more pictures of the Milky Way, so I pointed the camera up and took the following picture:

This time, I went for 10 seconds at f/2.8 (wide open on the 24-70mm) and bumped up the ISO to 3200 to capture the stars without any trails. Aghh…if only I had the Nikon 24mm f/1.4G with me! I could have certainly created better pictures at lower ISO levels…

Next morning, I was caught by surprise. As I got out of the car to start setting up my camera, I looked down the canyon and saw something furry and brown. It turned out to be a bear cub! He is obviously not that little anymore (probably 2nd year), but he certainly did express some interest in checking out what I was doing. I had my 24-70mm mounted on the camera and my longer lens (70-200mm) was in the car. I ran towards the car and told Sergey about what I saw. I then mounted the 70-200mm on my D3s and took some pictures of this fur-ball:

He looked at us a couple of times, then proceeded to his business with consuming plants and fruits:

After eating some of his breakfast, he disappeared into the woods.

My theme was definitely fences this time, so I found some and took more pictures with mountains:

Before leaving, we returned to the same spot where Sergey and I took pictures of the Milky Way at night. The sky was still cloudless, but I still like the way the below image came out:

We then hiked some more and found a small lake in a private area:

Lots of aspens with fall colors awaited us again:

So I took another shot with the sun in the frame. By the way, when you include the sun in your frame and you do not know how to shoot in manual mode (or do not want to), the simple trick is to switch your camera metering to spot metering, then point your AF point to a darker part of the frame that you want to expose properly. If you do not do this, the image might come out too dark because of the bright sun.

And here is the last picture I took before we took off back to Denver:

Stay tuned for a trip log from Yellowstone!

I hate to admit it, but this was my first time travelling to that part of Colorado – I have been living here for over 13 years! Everybody kept telling me to visit the “Switzerland of America”, but various circumstances and other travel plans have been putting off my trip year after year. This year has been super busy for Lola and I, for which we are certainly grateful, but at the same time, it left very little time for personal and family travel. But there is a big difference between a photography trip and a family trip. We knew that our kids would not enjoy it, so with promises to take them to Micky later this year, we took off.

I decided to start off with this picture, because it kind of characterizes our trip – a little extreme, colorful and plenty of sun with no clouds most of the time…and yes, that’s me in my truck on the top left side of the image. Lola certainly did not like the idea, but I decided to check it out, since there were already some Jeep tracks that went all the way to the top. As I got out of the car and looked down, my head spun a little, since it was an almost straight down fall for at least 150-200 feet.

Mid-day photography is never fun, so we drove for a while, looking for good spots. On our way to Telluride, we found plenty of aspens, with some in their fall plumage. Armed with the D700 and the Nikon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G VR, I took the following shot:

One thing you have to be careful about when shooting nature with close objects is depth of field. Depending on focal length of the lens, if your aperture is large, the object you focus on will be sharp, while objects that are not on the same plane will be out of focus. Why depending on focal length? Because the shorter the focal length, the larger the depth of field is. That’s why when you shoot with an ultra-wide angle lens everything seems to be perfectly in focus, while getting everything in focus with a telephoto lens on a close subject can often be difficult. I will be explaining all of this in detail, along with “hyperfocal distance” in my upcoming “Landscape photography howto” article.

Anyway, I had to use f/10 @ 1/125th of a second for the above image to get everything in focus and acceptably sharp. It is great that the 28-300mm has VR on it, since I shot handheld 90% of the time at slow shutter speeds, often due to small apertures and my polarizing filter which ate up 1-2 stops of light.

On the Last Dollar Road (yes, that’s the name of the unpaved road that leads to Telluride from Ridgway), we encountered a herd of sheep with some Mexican cowboys:

I kindly asked this guy to pose for me and he agreed, along with his dog:

The afternoon sun was blazing hot, with ugly direct sunlight, so after taking another picture of the sheep, we continued our scouting drive.

As we approached Telluride, I stopped at a spot with a bunch of aspens and took a few images with one of my favorite landscape lenses – the Nikon 24-70mm:

I took the same shot with the 28-300mm, which is posted on the Nikon 28-300 Review. I also used f/10 for this shot @ 1/400th of a second.

After dining at a local restaurant in Telluride, we took off to Ouray. The drive to Ouray was one of the most beautiful and scenic drives I have ever done in my life. Aspens were everywhere, with beautiful, golden fall colors:

As you can see, I did rely on my B+W 77mm polarizing filter a lot to get the sky bluer, reduce reflections and get rid of haze:

We were still about one week early to get the red aspen colors, but the gold was everywhere:

As I was moving around to find spots, I found this large device in the middle of the field:

Not sure what it is for, but it served me well for my composition! :)

There were plenty of mines along the way and this one was abandoned a while ago (captured with Nikon D3s and Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G):

The red mountain pass certainly has a lot of red:

Along the way, we were not too far away from the Mesa Verde National Park, so we decided to stay there for the night. After finding our camping spot at night, I took my tripod with the D3s + 24-70 out and decided to take a couple of pictures before we went to bed. The sky was clear and the moon light was very bright, so here is what my camera was able to capture:

I have never seen moonlight illuminate an area in such a way, that the colors all showed up in the image. I did not do anything special, just set the camera to manual mode, set shutter speed to 1/20th of a second and dialed f/5.0 on my lens. Why f/5.0? Because anything more would have required a lot more light and even slower shutter speeds, which would result in star trails. Yes, star trails are fun, but only when you shoot for a very long time – that’s when you see the longer lines. Anything longer than 20-25 seconds results in short and ugly star trails when shooting wide and I surely did not want to stay up all night either.

But I did point my camera up to capture a part of the Milky Way:

For which I had to go even faster at f/4.0 and 15 seconds.

We woke up very early next morning and started scouting the park for potential spots to photograph. The morning was surely a waste, since most of the good spots were closed till 9 AM. But we did take a few images of wild horses:

As soon as the Cliff Palace was opened, we headed down to take some pictures before tourists poured in:

I have a very nice picture of a famous kiva that I will post later this week, which is located at the Cliff Palace. In terms of light, the best time to be at the Cliff Palace is at around noon, when the sun rays reach the kiva and illuminate the walls of the palace.

Lola found this bench with leaves on our way back:

We were very impressed by the kiva at the Cliff Palance, so we decided to check out the big one, the Great Kiva in Aztec, Arizona:

Apparently, the town was named “Aztec”, because people who found the kiva thought that it was made by Aztecs! The kiva was restored to look similar to what it would have looked like before the top collapsed. It is certainly a cool place to visit!

I really wanted to take some pictures of the Cliff Palace in the evening, so we took a few more pictures and then drove back to Mesa Verde. We did not quite make it on time for the nice evening light, but I still captured a few pictures of the Cliff Palace after sunset, including this panorama:

We stayed at Mesa Verde for one more night. Next morning, we took off back to Ouray to capture some more pictures of the fall colors.

On our route back, despite all warning signs (which I did not even care to read), I was stupid enough to try one of the 4×4-only roads on the 4Runner. I can’t remember its name, but it is the most dangerous 4×4 route that leads to Telluride. Well, after about half a mile or so of going uphill at 30-45% angles, I realized that maybe it was not such a good idea. All this time, Lola was just silent. I don’t know what was running through her head, but I’m glad that she was sitting on the passenger side, which was the mountain side. Every once in a while, I would look down and realize that if something went wrong, we would be going straight downhill more than 500 feet. The road was so narrow, that I could barely fit.

As we drove further up, I found one spot where the road was a little wider. I asked Lola to get out and guide me, while I tried to turn around:

I wish I captured this shot from higher up to show you the perspective, but looking down was pretty scary! I was just not ready for this kind of off-road experience. Slowly and carefully, I managed to turn back and we drove back, very slowly. On our way back to highway, we met one crazy guy on a 4×4 Jeep that wanted to do it twice on that day. He was a photographer…

After this experience, we found another 4×4 drive, but it was much shorter, wider and easier to drive on. The reward at the end of the road was this waterfall:

I captured the waterfall using techniques that I share in my “how to photograph waterfalls” article. Basically, I used a 6 stop Neutral Density filter to decrease the amount of light that comes through the lens. By doing that, I was able to get the running water look silky and smooth.

After photographing the waterfalls, we continued our drive back to Ridgway, stopping on the way and taking more pictures of aspens:

Captured this shot in Ridgway:

We then headed back to Telluride through Dallas Divide. After a good late lunch meal at the same Chinese restaurant called “Shanghai Palace” we ate at before (great food by the way), we decided to snap a few pictures of this beautiful town:

The colors were amazing!

I could not get enough of Dallas Divide, so when I saw some cloud formations, I filled up my gas tank and took the Last Dollar Road from Telluride back again:

The sunset was absolutely beautiful!

Too bad we only got the clouds on the day when we were supposed to leave, but I knew that it was a sign – we needed to come back :)

Stay tuned for the part 2 of our trip log!