Here is the second installment of my photos from my trip in October 2022 to Ridgeway CO and the San Juan Mountains for fall foliage photography.
When I have been to a place multiple times to photograph there are a couple of conflicting priorities for me. One is that I want to recreate previous photos I’ve taken to see if I can do them better. The other is trying to get unique shots for this particular trip. The above image is from a particular spot I haven’t taken a photo from before. I love the creek in this image. Usually at this location you are taking a photo of Mt. Sneffels, the peak poking above the trees in the center, not the creek that runs through the valley.
This was a difficult shot to get the exposure correct since the clouds were casting shadows on Mt. Sneffels. I love the patches of sunlight on the side of the mountains though.
Driving back towards Ridgeway, CO from the foothills where we took most of our fall foliage shots is this view of the ridge I believe north of Ridgeway, CO. I made the assumption that this is the ridge, Ridgeway is named after. 🙂 I have no idea if this is true, but it seems like it should be to me.
I saw this view in the rear view mirror driving out to take photos and had to pull over and take these shots! The lighting was really good and with the clouds I didn’t want to miss it. I decided to add the dimensions of this shot as well after discussing the dimensions of the Mt. Sneffels photo below. Full resolution print size is 70″ x 20″, the largest good quality resolution print size is 190″ (15.6′) x 60″ (5′)! This is the advantage of your full frame large pixel count cameras verses a phone camera or a cheaper camera. I tried to export this panorama to print out at the 72″x24″ resolution, and Lightroom warned me the created file would be 593MB!!! So I didn’t save it at this resolution. I cut the resolution to 36″x12″ to get an image size I could send in to print. Its MB size was still 30 MBs.
I love this photograph and the little trail headed down towards the mountain creating a lead into the scene. Makes me feel like I’m on a journey in middle earth.
Okay, the photograph below is my attempt to improve on the classic Mt. Sneffels photograph I took in 2012.
I have hundreds of photographs from this location at different zoom levels, exposures and at different times of the day. This shot is from late afternoon. I chose this image even though I have wider images of the whole scene, because I like the detail provided by the full image. The forecast called for rain and snow the weekend we were here. We were only rained on a few times but the stormy weather was awesome for providing clouds to our skies! This is another 3 shot panorama with my 70-200mm 2.8E lens. It is roughly 12000 x 9000 pixels and the level of detail provided by the closer zoom is amazing. For those not familiar with pixel sizes, a print of this shot at full resolution is 40″x 30″ and the largest print that could be printed with great detail is a huge 120″ x 90″ (10 feet by 7.5 feet). The 36″ x 24″ resolution print file I created for this shot is 70MB due to the extra detail.
This is one of the big downsides to shooting panoramas with the Nikon D850, the huge MB raw files. They are incredibly large, and the computer, well my computer 🙂 , has a rough time processing the data when changes are made.
Anyway, here is the gallery of the latest photo installment.
