I don’t know why, but I’ve always been drawn to mountain laurel blooms; I personally find them to be so unusual and interesting looking.  Well this year, the mountain laurel were REALLY pop’n, especially along the Foothills Parkway.  There were a couple mornings where I found myself photographing the sunrise, and then spinning around and shooting the mountain laurel while I was there.  They were just so pretty!  There were multiple places along the road that the plants were just bursting with blooms. 

After seeing this a couple of times, I decided to needed to somehow capture a scene that illustrated just how full the plants were, and that’s where I ran into my challenge.  A good many of the mountain laurel along the road are hanging on to steep embankments, and the plants themselves were TALL, meaning I would find myself shooting up at them, which didn’t really tell the story I was after.  One morning as I was exploring, I found a big rock I could get up on that gave me vantage point to look down on some of the blooms, while blooms further back in the scene climbed higher into the background.  Through the process of finding the composition above, I ended up finding a few others that I liked as well, which I’ve shared below.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I did while I was photographing them!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson