Yep, the amount, variety, intensity and quantity of fall color we experienced this last week in Cripple Creek, CO was simply … overwhelming! As I kept saying to Sharon the whole time, while we’ve got great fall color in the Eastern Sierra, we don’t have any of the grand vistas of slope after slope blazing yellow like we experienced in CO. It was truly hard at times to narrow your vision down to just the viewfinder because no matter the lens in use, you couldn’t take it all in. And you wanted to take in this blaze of color! But for us photographers, put our eyes to the viewfinder we must.
These three photos along with a lot of what I shot this past week was with the Df / 80-400VR3 and for a very simple reason. The overwhelming vistas we experienced often didn’t translate perfectly into the viewfinder with a lens like the 24-70AFS. I did use that lens a lot, but not nearly as much as the 80-400. This is because while our eyes and mind sees that grand vistas, it does a great job of eliminating unwanted elements that the cold hearted bastard insists in including in our viewfinder! In order for you to “see” what I was feeling, I needed to use more glass to isolate those clumps and stands and forests of color. These three photos are a classic example of what I’m talking about.
You might be looking at these photos and wondering to yourself, “is that color real?” If you mean, is this the color we saw, it most definitely is. If you’re wondering if I hit the saturation slider to make these colors pop, I most certainly did not. The first main factor in this great color is we hit the color perfectly! As we left town to go home, we could already see stands of color we photographed when we first arrived (bottom photo) with lots of bare trees! Next, much of the time since we were at 9424′ in altitude, we had a Kelvin temp well above 9000k. Auto White balance doesn’t work at that range so we set the camera to Cloudy. Then there is the incorporation of green in the photo and underexposure which makes the colors fly off the monitor. And finally, there were some finishing “tricks” in post to “fool” the mind’s eye to get the photo back to the blazing glory we witnessed. But you could hold these images up to the real thing and they would both look identical. It was simply, overwhelming!