Colorful Aspen Grove on a Hillside

Autumn, Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains in Eastern California.

There are so many different ways to go about photographing autumn aspens. My first instinct is to fill the frame with brilliant colors. The next might be to isolate a few brightly colored leaves.

Here I was working my way up and along the shoulder of the road to another stand of aspens I like to visit. There is no good or safe parking near those trees which almost always guarantees that I will be the only one there. By nature, most leaf peepers are lazy and the only leafs that they will see are viewed through the windshield.

En route to my aspen stand I stopped to take in this scene. I liked the light. I also liked the layers of the landscape. I changed my lens from my 70mm - 200mm to my 24mm - 70mm in order to reduce the compression. I thought that this photograph offered a different perspective and told an interesting story. I wanted to show the bright yellow foreground aspens to be a small part of the overall landscape. I wanted to show the ruggedness of the foreground and steepness of the background mountainside. I also wanted to show the different stages of color transition between nearby (foreground) aspens and the smaller stand just behind them.

This always fascinates me. Why is one stand brilliant and another maybe twenty feet away much less brilliant or maybe the other extreme and already barren? So much to learn...

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