My Best of 2013

2013, what a year. Most weekdays and Saturdays I was out in the morning with my camera. What a wonderful way to start the day. I needed to send my favorite lens in for repair, and I purchased a cheap 70-300, plastic barrel, macro zoom, so I’d have something to shoot with during the month that my lens was away. Little did I know that I would become addicted to this lens. Macros became a regular part of my repertoire. We also had all this horrible flooding here in Colorado, and while my family was amazingly left unscathed, many of my favorite local, and high country trails became unavailable. All in all, I’m very pleased with what I’ve produced this year.

I came across this little gem while wandering on some high-country ice. If one gets real quiet and starts looking down, you uncover amazing things.

We had a week of sub-zero and single digit temperatures here that produced some wonderful ice, which unfortunately is all gone. The is the reflection of the sunrise in frozen Boulder Creek.

When I go out in the morning, I have a particular location in mind depending on the skies and the weather, but I never know what will end up grabbing me and producing interesting photographs. I was on South Boulder Creek to get a nice sunrise landscape with these interesting trees and the ice reflecting the sky. However, before the sun came up, I busied myself with some interesting cracks. It was still pretty dark. The exposure for this was something like 25 seconds. I didn’t think much about it when I took it, but it’s turned out to be one of my favorites.

We have some amazing sunrises here, but no local locations for classical sunrise landscapes with leading lines and a mountain in the background. That’s fine with me because there are already so many great landscape photographs of this kind around. I don’t need to produce more. Instead, I’ve tried to just make interesting photographs of the sky. Most of the time I have great colors and shapes, but the photos aren’t that compelling. Occasionally I luck out like I did with this image.

I’ve always been fascinated with summer grasses, and this summer, with my macro lens, I got into a good groove and had a great, productive time.

The heavy rains that we had produced some wonderful fall color here.

Sometimes the littlest of things can be so expressive.

The morning sun illuminates the grass while the background is still in shadow. This image reminds me of a piece of music. I think an Eric Satie piano piece would go well with it.

The composition of this is similar to the previous image, but the photo feels very different to me.

I love the feeling of movement that this photo gives.

From one of my too few forays into the high country. First this mother had to chase another moose from her drinking spot before posing for this sweet pic.

I had a good time playing with my macro lens and selective focus. I love the sharp parts and out of focus shapes and colors of this.

This is my nephew Nico at his father’s and my brother’s 80th birthday party. I was only taking photos to document the event, but I love the way this photo turned out. Photographing parties is hard, because you can either be at the party or be observing the party. Since I’d much rather be at the party, I don’t do a lot of people photographs. But I like this photo so much, I want to try to do more.

This little composition grabbed me the minute I saw it. I call it Pond Art.

Reflections of fall color in a little pond caused by the extensive flooding we had this fall.

Ice in the high country on Boulder Creek.

If you’ve gotten this far, I hope you like what you’ve seen. Thank you for coming and spending the time.

– Dan

~ by danbaumbach on December 26, 2013.