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I really love the Rocky Mountains in spring. All day long I listen to the sounds of hummingbirds whizzing around, sounding just like those flying cars from the Jetsons cartoons. The breeze kicks up and the smell of earth and pine needles fills my lungs with every breath. From my front deck I look down to the Cache la Poudre river below and watch the kayakers and rafters braving the rapids below. When I’m not careful and leave a bag of trash out, a neighborhood bear comes and flings it everywhere in the middle of the night. OK that part isn’t so cool, but how cool is it having bears around?

It’s really quite beautiful, and photogenic. It makes me want to grab my camera, take a hike, and take a photo. It also makes me want to play with high dynamic range (HDR) images more. The colors that are everywhere just beg to be shown off in photos! Simply taking a photo and bumping up the saturation won’t do.

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I’ve been a subscriber to Trey Ratcliff’s Stuck in Customs photoblog for quite some time now. If you like HDR, you simply must check out his site. He’s been all over the world, so much so that he could possibly say he has no home. His site is full of HDR images of exotic far away places, and some of his hometown of Austin, Texas (where I moved here from five months ago). Knowing that he has a HDR tutorial, I read up on it and decided to make some images of my own.

Hewlett Gulch
This past weekend I took the family on a little late morning hike to Hewlett Gulch, just a few miles from our house. Not the most beautiful part of the Rockies, but enough to get my HDR juices flowing.

With a 30 pound toddler on my back saying “hi” and “bye bye” to every flower, rock, and blade of grass, I huffed and puffed my way up the canyon. With a potential killer photo around every bend, I couldn’t let a little out-of-shapedness stop me from moving forward. Boy I’m looking forward to the day when my son can hike on his own.

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If you look through my Flickr stream, you’ll see all the HDR photos from the day. You may notice that I found myself naturally preferring to keep the HDR “surrealness” down to a modest level. With HDR you can really go over the top and make your images look quite, well, freaky. Cool, but freaky. There was only one photo that made me get my freak on (at left). We came upon his fireplace out in the middle of the woods. There were still ashes and everything. It was quite odd, and the scene had a strange feel to it. So I really punched up the HDR look.

If you haven’t tried HDR yet, I’d encourage you to give it a try. It’s a lot of fun, and you can get a free trial version of Photomatix. Just be careful, it’s a little addictive. I’ll be posting some more HDR photos as I take them.

And as I figure it out, I’ll post some results of my next experiment: HDR panoramic images.

I had the day off yesterday, so my wife and I took a drive up to Rocky Mountain National Park for a little snowshoeing. It was a nice sunny day, but the wind was howling.

We hiked up to Nymph Lake and took some photos there. At left is me standing out on the ice. I’m not really sure how thick it was, but it was thick enough that I couldn’t see all the way through the ice.

Nymph Lake was about a mile from the parking area. We decided we wanted a longer hike and wanted to see more of the park’s beauty, so we headed further up the mountain to Dream Lake. On the trail, we stumbled upon this beautiful scene. We were totally off the trail now, and were blazing through thigh deep powder. It was awesome.

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Once we finally arrived at Dream Lake about another mile past Nymph Lake in deep powder, the wind was blowing 60-80 miles per hour. It was brutal. We wanted to go further to the next lake, but just couldn’t take the pounding blowing snow. So we quickly snapped off a few photos, and headed for the shelter of the trees. Here are a few of the photos we came away with.

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