Aspen, Pot Hollow, Uinta National Forest, Utah

This image represents one of those rare instances last year when a composition just knocked me over the head like a hammer. I was dropping back to the Deer Creek campground in Wasatch Mountain State Park, through Pot Hollow, at the end of a long hike. I had been looking for graphic compositions all day and not really finding much. I was zipping down the trail in late afternoon, when I rounded a bend and this scene stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t think twice, I knew instantly I wanted to make a photograph. I also knew the scene was larger than a single frame with my widest lens, so I set up my tripod and quickly captured a series of three overlapping vertical images to create this composite.

Winter Aspen Panorama, Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

One of the rules of color landscape photography that I’ve always lived by is: you cannot photograph a white sky.  A dark grey, brooding sky, yes, always; but a white sky, never. Well almost never.

A solid white, featureless sky creates perfect light for photographing nature’s intimate details, compositions that take advantage of soft, even illumination without actually including the sky in the frame. Sometimes, black and white conversion is the answer to working with a pure white sky.  An example of this can be seen in my previous blog post. White on white, winter landscapes may offer another avenue of exploration. Still I wouldn’t want to include a large block of blank white sky in my winter landscapes.