Woke up early this morning. As soon as I could pry my eyes open I took a quick look at my weather app, 27 degrees with snow… perfect! Not going to go out the door with no coffee and frozen waffles though, not going to happen. In the meantime, a look down the valley towards the Sangre de Cristo looked promising. Couldn’t really tell if I was looking at a cloud or a fog bank, but it was nice and I knew I was going to be taking out the camera into the weather!
As the big dog and I wound our way along the mountain road to the trailhead it started
to snow a little… beautiful dry wispy snowflakes falling down from the sky, kind of like a snow globe 🙂 I was hoping for a good mountain view of the Sangre de Cristo from the summit, but there were too many clouds. Nice clouds though, with a few bursts of snow going on in different places, well worth a couple minutes break in the hiking for some weather photos!
But that was nothing compared to the treat I encountered in the woods on the way back down! A small herd of mule deer had gathered in the mountain grass at the edge of the aspen forest for their breakfast 🙂 They cast a few curious looks in our direction but mainly just kept eating. Thanks to my big Canon 400mm lens I didn’t have to get too close to get some decent shots. I’m sure with my old 200mm I would have tried to get closer and scared them off. So we shot, they ate and the snow kept falling. I chose ISO 400 in hopes of freezing the snowflakes. I’ve learned that too slow a shutter speed makes for snow streaks instead of snowflakes and that’s no good.
I really couldn’t see on the display whether or not the snowflakes were visible, but I just kept shooting. I wasn’t going to be able to get a faster shutter speed in that light anyway. However now at home in front of the computer I was in for some pleasant surprises 🙂 One of these shots I thought had two deer in it actually had three with one kind pf peeking around another one and the snowflakes turned out to be just right. Some are just small dots, some of the closer ones turned into surreal looking globes but that’s ok.
I was thinking about boosting the contrast and color in Photoshop but I eventually decided that any special effects betrayed the dreary mood of the scene, and it is that dreary snowy mood that I love and live to get out in and experience! I guess that’s a good thing since life in the Rocky Mountains at 10,000 feet serves up a lot of mornings like that!
As always these images and more are available on my website for purchase as wall art on glossy metal or acrylic sheets, stretched canvas and traditional framing and matting. Tons of cool household, tech and gift items are also available by simply clicking an image you like and scrolling down to the options menu! Sometimes I come across a situation and some captures that are so special to me that I really don’t want to sell them as stock where they sometimes go for peanuts. Such as it is with these, they are only available in print form on my website and not as RF stock on the stock sites. Stay tuned, there are many more of these to come, plus a couple of weather landscapes of the nearby peaks.
