Here’s a quick one from a recent shoot out in the Rockies. While making my way back towards Banff along the Bow Valley Parkway, I stopped to make this image looking into the trees.

I’ve been wanting to capture a tree image like this for a while now, but have just never actually stopped to do it. There are a few places along that stretch of road where the rows of trees just seem to fade away into darkness as you look deeper into the forest. I’ve often thought that this would make for an interesting image given the right conditions but just hadn’t quite seen what I was looking for yet. On this particular morning, the light was bright, yet overcast so it was nice and soft and even. This helped, along with finding a spot looking at the southwest side of the trees. (Anybody know why this orange colour comes out on that side of the trees? Is it the exposure to the sun? Any tree experts out there?) The real challenge though, was getting myself up high enough so I wouldn’t have to tilt the camera up and distort the perspective. I wound up setting the tripod up in the back of my truck as high as I could and that got me really close. I still ended up slightly tweaking the perspective a little more in Photoshop to get things looking truly vertical. I don’t know if I’ve completely got what I’ve been looking for here yet, but I think is’s close.

The most entertaining part of all this was watching the tourists pull up and try to see what I was photographing while I was standing up there in the back of my truck… only to see nothing but a bunch of trees.

Thanks for looking!