Anatomy of a Composition - The Long View (Panorama)

Pennsylvania Mountain offers one of my favorite views of anywhere in Colorado. The new year and month found dynamic weather blowing over the Rocky Mountains, with snow piling up across the state and temperatures dropping. There wasn’t any certainty that the sun would make an appearance, but making a pre-dawn hike proved to be absolutely worthwhile.

The cold and wind should be the deterrent on a morning like this, and certainly with hands aching and every other step offering a knee deep plunge into the new snow, the conditions were at times overwhelming, but the hike into the darkness offered real clarity to the moment.  Conditions like this for the moment to come forward; yesterday and tomorrow drift to the back of the mind, what comes sliding forward is the next step, your bodies temperature, the sense of where the wind is cutting through the layers layers and reaching your skin - it’s these moments that distill what is the very best about being alive.

Setting up a time lapse and carrying a second camera for stills may seem excessive, and this morning I was rethinking this proposition. It was a challenge enough just to find a spot out of the blowing wind and with the blue hour light periodically muted by gusts of blowing snow, there was even less certainty that the dynamic light I was hoping for would appear.  As the first camera captured image after image I struggled to find compositions with the second camera.  With dawn glowing on the Eastern horizon the color of the sky started to drop its blue hues and take on the orange and yellow tones seen in this image.  It took some time before the boldness of the light would present itself, but I knew I would need to move about and find some other composition to capture the scale of the scene.

This photo was higher on the mountain than I normally set up and set to the opposite side.  This allowed a less obscured frame and offered a simpler foreground, so shooting the panorama to capture the scale of the scene was much simpler.  The blowing snow cut down the crisp line of the horizon but the ghostly veil added a welcome element. 

January, 2023 - As always, thank you for the support and for joining me on this adventure.

For more thoughts on some of these images, and life’s other travails, head to www.wordpress.com/alma175w  

The Long View (Panorama - ISO 400 | F/8 | 1/10 sec. - 10 stitched together, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop - Sony a7iv & Sony FE 70-200GM