Fall 2010 Canadian Rockies Photo Tour — Gold On Green

Gold On Green, Icefields Parkway

I’m continuing to slowly work my way through the photographs I took on the recent Fall 2010 Photo Tour. Since it was a fall tour, I have been concentrating on images of fall color, to start.

Here is one that needed a bit of work to capture. Driving along the Icefields Parkway north towards Jasper, at the start of our second day, we passed a brilliantly glowing stand of aspen heavily surrounded by darker coniferous forest. I had a hunch something could be made of this situation, so we pulled over at a convenient turnout and spent a bit of time working the situation.

From the road, some compositions were possible but they weren’t completely satisfying, at least not to me. They didn’t seem to deliver on what had caught my eye about this spot to start with. The light angle didn’t seem helpful, and we were looking up towards the tops of the trees where the best color was. The backdrop was a somewhat unappealing mountain slope.

After working the initial views for awhile, a few of us crossed the road and worked a bit up a slope into a clearing. Footing was tricky due to deadfall that had formed the opening, from where we could look in several different directions, including back the opposite direction against the far side of the valley. This provided a very different perspective, as well as access to a much more interesting angle & range of light, and gave me a more satisfying result. Changing the parameters a little is sometimes all it takes to find something interesting.