Fall is in full swing in many areas of the west here and reports I am seeing is it looks pretty good. Two days ago I ventured across Oregon’s Santiam Pass and while the color was great near pass levels, it was barely started in lower elevations at 2000′. So this is an image from a trip a few years ago, one of my last trips using the 4×5 view camera before selling it all.
It seems late in the summer, that the world is on fire. That is probably an exaggeration, but in the Western US where I am, there are wildfires everywhere and the forest fire smoke has been thick as fog lately.
While late summer is not the best time to photograph many of the iconic locations around here, the smoke has made it hardly worthwhile to venture out. But yesterday I hooked up with a photographer visiting from the east coast and I wanted him to see our iconic locations.
So we went anyway to Sparks Lake, our most iconic location around here, and sure enough the smoke was thick. I was not motivated to shoot when I got there but then I started to frame some scenes and realized that while this unfortunate smoke was ruining a scene that I have shot countless times, it was creating a whole new view of the mountain and lake reflection, that I never see or photograph.
