Summit County Citizens Voice

On this summer evening I was in the middle of cooking dinner when the sky lit up without much warning. With several pots bubbling on the stove, I didn't have time to walk down to the wetlands or drive to prime viewing spot, so I just went on our southeast facing porch tried to get an angle that showed the height of this dissipating thundercloud. Since we live in a sort industrial/commercial'residential interface zone, the view from this spot includes part of Xcel's Frisco substation, parts of the old medical center property and corners of some other semi-industrial properties, but that didn't take anything away from this celestial display. The only post-processing here was a crop to square the image so it displays better in the WordPress format. Because of the vertical layout of the blog, square works better than the traditional aspect ratio. It kind of makes me nostalgic for one of the old square format film cameras!

As we wrapped up an evening fishing session at Dillon Reservoir, Dylan and I were surprised by the quick intensification of this sunset. At first, it didn't look like it was going to be any big deal, but apparently the clouds were at just the right angle to capture, reflect and magnify some magnificent alpenglow on the Continental Divide. This is another image that hasn't been post-processed for color, just cropped, so what you see is what it looked like.

This is the same sunset as the image above, just looking northwest toward the Gore Range. Once again, no post-processing other than a crop.

In contrast to the previous sunset, this one took a long time to develop. I was out along Oro Grande Road, and several times I nearly packed my camera away and left, because it just seemed to be getting darker. But finally ... above the familiar outline of Swan Mountain, it popped.

An afternoon searching for cutthroats with two 12-years at Clinton Gulch Reservoir ended with this sunset. Even the boys were impressed, especially since we found an amazing echo chamber right near the spot where this picture was taken. I used a point-and-shoot Fuji Finepix for this image, trying out a "sunset" option in the menu for the first time. The setting does seem to intensify the color and boost the contrast for a string silhouettte effect, but even so, all three of us agreed that it was one of the best sunsets of the summer.

I had to get up early for this mid-summer sunrise scene in the Meadow Creek wetlands near Frisco. As I went back to my photo files to compile this gallery, I was a little surprised to see that there was no post-processing on this picture either, just pure golden morning light.