No snow, and no gems!

Yesterday I visited two lakes, the names of which created a great deal of disappointment. There was only a tiny bit of snow on the edges of Snow Lake, and none whatsoever where the hiking trails were. Nor were there any gems at Gem Lake, a bit farther down the trail. Whoever named them should have called them, respectively, Lake Blowing Dust and Lake Sweat. These names were much more appropriate to my experience. Even though it's October, the trail is very dusty due to our ridiculous dry spell. And sheltered areas were cold, but sunny slopes (like the one you have to climb to get to Gem Lake) were quite hot.

As usual, I'll begin with my favorite compositions. For this first, I must admit that I stole an idea from Ansel Adams. I saw a picture of his that featured some trees and things with a mountain in the background, and the top of the mountain was not in the frame. I liked this, thinking it gave the picture a sense of scale. Ansel Adams' picture took place in mist; mine highlights sunrise light striking the mountain. I like how it ended up.

For this next one, I was looking for a way to portray the beautiful fall colors of the ground cover at high elevations. I found this lone green conifer (not sure what kind) growing among the leaves, and figured that focusing on it would bring attention to the contrasting foliage colors around it. A bit of diffuse sunlight was coming through some trees overhead - perfect! I used f/4 to minimize depth of field and keep attention on the tree.

Now for the partial successes. This one comes from Gem Lake. I'm not 100% pleased with how I positioned the berry bush in the frame...but honestly, it was blowing around a lot so I had a hard time doing so. I think the autumn colors in the background came out pretty well, better than I was expecting. I used f/10 to get most of the bush sharp and keep a bit of definition in the background.

This one looks up what, at some point during the year, was probably a streambed. The sky is a bit washed out, but I like the exaggerated wide-angle perspective.

This view of Snow Lake took some doing to expose properly, and I'm still not satisfied. Even at f/29, I couldn't get quite enough depth of field, so I had to settle for the mountains being slightly out of focus to get the foliage sharp (you can't tell at this size). That said, I kind of like the composition; ironically, this picture looks better compositionally at a larger size.

...Finally, this one I took near Snow Lake. I was attracted to the way the light was beginning to emerge over the hillside. I used a graduated neutral density filter, and tilted it to match the sunlight in the frame. In postprocessing, I would probably want to lighten the foreground and perhaps saturate the colors a bit.