Five Backlit Fall Quaking Aspen Trunks

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Toyabe National Forest, Mono County
early morning September 29, 2001, slide 01J5-23
Pentax 67 AEII with 55-100mm zoom, Benbo Trekker
Drum scanned Kodak EPN100 220 film to 200mb RGB file
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 processed for accurate image fidelity
Lightjet5000 printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
signature bottom right

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A few years before making this image, a friend and I had roamed through this grove on a crystal clear breezy mid October day. My friend spent quite a bit of time tripoded in front of this group of aspen trunks while I amused myself on other trees. When I came back to see how he was doing, the sun's position was too high for a good image. On this trip in 2001 we again visited this same grove and I made a point of getting a shot in here at the optimum time of morning for a backlit image. Finding a setting of large aspen trunks with a thin open canopy approximately equidistant from possible camera positions is unusual. Even more rare is for there to be a clearing behind such trunks in which a low angled sun is not blocked by other trees. Note being equidistant allows for better overall focus due to limited depth of field.

Quaking aspen, populus tremuloides, translucent leaves when undergoing fall color changes, often have a wonderfully vibrant glow when backlit by the sun. Despite the capabilities of man's modern photographic films, any print from such film pales against the actual experience beneath such trees. Beautiful yellow and orange light bathes shadows of the understory. What one cannot see from this one-dimensional perspective is that behind and above my tripod were more tall aspen with open canopies glowing with a ceiling of such leaves. That subtle glow is evident on the whitish bark of the shadowed trunks that picks up such light well showing a surprising amount of detail despite being in a backlit shadow. The sun's position is about 85% up the frame behind the fourth tree from left. Accordingly it captures an excellent example of brightness gradiation away from that location towards the left side.

Crop at 100% print size:

   David Senesac
   email: sales@davidsenesac.com

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