Thin Quaking Aspen across SR89 in Hope Valley

---

Toyabe National Forest, Alpine County
late morning October 13, 2002, slide 02X3-8
Pentax 67 AEII, 55-100mm zoom, Benbo Trekker
Drum scanned Fuji Provia 100F 220 film to 200mb RGB file
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 processed for accurate image fidelity
Lightjet5000 printed inches @304.8ppi on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
signature top mid right

---

Just before noon, I came to the long grove of aspens, populus tremuloides, on both sides of California highway SR89. This is at 7,120 feet on southeast flanks of Thompson Peak in Hope Valley where the highway descends from Luther Pass. Maybe two dozen vehicles had parked along this stretch of the highway. There was considerable weekend Sunday traffic along the road. No doubt many were out sightseeing the fall colors. Cars were slowing down to gawk and some were improperly parking with parts of the vehicles sticking out into the highway. Of course lots of people with little cameras were walking about and crossing the pavement to further disrupt the highway traffic. This section on the north side of the highway had immediately caught my eye driving by.

Aspens often root sprout that causes groups of adjacent trees to be similar. Here one such group of aspens on the right is oddly tall and thin with jeffery pines, pinus jeffreyi, and lodgepole pine, pinus murrayana, providing a nice contrasting dark green background. Further aspens on the right frame edge had already lost most of their leaves that provided fine naked profiles with an enhanced sense of image sharpness. I noted the one bright aspen trunk, so positioned my tripod to get its clear view and anchored it to frame center. Since the road was directly in front of me I did not wish to include any part of the pavement. One problem was there were trees in the scene that were quite tall so when including the full height of those trees, I'd zoomed so wide that the impact of the rest of the frame suffered. Another aspect of the shot to deal with was due to the vertical nature of the trunks, tilting my lens up a bit while wide to remove the pavement would have caused undesirable bowing in of the vertical trunk elements. Thus I concentrated on getting a bit of the naked trees at right and most of the impressively saturated multi-hued leaved trees to the left at a more normal lens zoom.

And I had to get my tripod up as high as possible to do so. Other difficulties were a modest breeze was rarely waning and of course the cars passing by on the highway caused their own gusts of winds as well as ground vibration for my tripod setup.

I extended the Benbo Trekker arm as high as possible and braced it down to the ground with a custom fourth leg of wood. In addition to always using mirror lock up with a shutter release cable, I weight the top of the Pentax pentaprism with a weighted bag given the considerable Pentax shutter curtain. After setting up the frame and camera controls for the exposure, one car parked right in front of this spot. With a frown I motioned the driver to move a bit more to the right and he did so.

A gal got out and then she proceeded to get into my frame. I let her take the hand held shots guessing she would be someone who would shoot and soon move on. She got down below the road into the yellow willow, salix saliandra, fall changed here to of course yellow. While waiting, the breeze quieted. Aha! I noticed the long brown haired miss was in an interesting position that blended into the willow in a nice way so depressed the shutter. Yes! Not only did I get a gorgeous image but also it has a photographer in it. She is not so noticeable to detract from the image while adding an appropriate element of what was occurring this wonderful day. Another interesting not so obvious element is a remnant of an old wood and barbed wire fence at the base of the naked trees. Also at the base of the same area is drying yellow tall grass. This whole hillside area has seeps that are of course why the tall grass, aspens, and willow have colonized the slope.

Crop at 100% print size:

   David Senesac
   email: sales@davidsenesac.com

return to home page