south boulder peak hike

date of hike: sunday, 10/26/08

After hiking up to Bear Peak back in April, I'd had it in the back of my mind to return sometime and also bag its next-door-neighbor, South Boulder Peak. The diverse sprawl of land that makes up The City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks includes six "major" peaks, and South Boulder Peak (8549 ft) is the tallest.

On the hike up, by the Stockton Cabin, there was a small pool of water alongside the trail. I broke out the PowerShot and took 5 or 6 shots of the leaves which had fallen and collected in the water. I thought the disorderly variety of shapes & (muted) colors might make for an interesting photograph. And this turned out to be my favorite photo from this hike. I titled it "The Fallen." As I was taking the photo, I was consciously trying to compose it so that the entire frame would be filled with leaves, and so the yellow leaf (a splash of brighter color) would be in the center of the shot. After I got home and had the JPEG opened up on the computer (the PowerShot doesn't have the capability to shoot in RAW), I went through my usual workflow in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 to tweak the shot. Depending on the shot, my 'usual' workflow includes: levels, brightness & contrast, saturation, sharpening, lighten shadows/darken highlights. With this shot, I also ran it through the Poster Edges filter. There are quite a few features & tools in Elements that I still don't quite get (like layers), so I usually just stick with the basics when I'm editing a shot.

I like photos such as this- ones that focus on intimate details of the landscape that you'll most likely miss if you are not actively searching for them. One of the things I enjoy about photography is that it's teaching me to see the world differently. John Fielder (an amazingly talented landscape photographer who lives here in Colorado) said, "Photography is 90 percent seeing and 10 percent photographing..." And I've found that to be so true. I look at the world differently when I have a camera with me. I constantly scan near & far, on the look-out for interesting contrast and light, color, line and shape, texture.

I shot quite a few other photos on this hike (let me tell you, finding a place to set-up the tripod on the jumbled rocks of the summit was tricky), but as I said before, this is my favorite. I'm not sure I can tell you why, except maybe that it's the most 'intimate' landscape I shot that day.

Thanks for reading about stuff I've photographed. - Rich