I kicked off my fall color series last week, commenting on the fact of how many shooting days we’d had this fall.  I was convinced at the time that the shooting was over with last Sunday because of all the wind we were having, but just this morning I was shooting sunrise, and I had beautiful red trees in the foreground!  What this fall has lacked in whole-hillside color, it seems to have made up with long-lasting patchy color that has been just gorgeous!  Admittedly at this point the mountains are all but bare, but there are a few trees and shrubs hanging in there with some nice color (one of the trees in my front yard is a brilliant red right now).  Speaking of sunrises, we’ve had some absolutely splendid ones this fall!  So many, in fact, that I’m going to share a trio of sunrise / sunset images at the end of my fall color series.

This and last week’s image I captured very early in the fall; both were captured in the first week of October in the higher elevations of the park.  This week’s image is of one of the sets of stairs along the Chimney Top trail.  I had been playing around in the stream there, and as I was coming out of the water I happened to see these stairs with nice light on them, so I decided to photograph them for a while.  I thought the image could make a nice compliment to the trail scenes I was shooting this summer!  My friend Bill Lea is constantly reminding me to not go out photographing with a particular subject in mind, but instead, shoot whatever the light is doing that is interesting.  I have adapted this philosophy into my own personal saying, “If you see it, shoot it”.  This particular scene plays these ideas out well because I was there actually nosing around looking for stream scenes, and instead came home with a trail scene.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson

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