Week 120 — “Sunrise” at Dream Lake

I’ve been posting a lot of street photographs lately, so I figured I’d switch it up for this week’s post. I took this image a little over a year ago at Dream Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. I left Fort Collins around 3am with grand visions of a beautiful Dream Lake sunrise. The weather forecasts looked good – all clear skies, they said. But the weather changes quickly in the mountains, and by the time I was halfway through my hike it had started to snow. I debated not even taking pictures when I got here and just enjoying the hike, but when I saw these two snowshoers trek across the frozen lake I decided to grab this shot.

Establishing a sense of scale is one of the trickiest things to do in landscape photography, and in my opinion it’s one of the primary reasons images of landscapes are so often a disappointment compared to the landscapes themselves. Adding people to landscapes images is a great way to establish the sense of scale, but I also spend the majority of my time in nature trying to avoid people…so opportunities to include people in my landscapes in a natural way are few and far between. In this case, I got lucky that there were a couple other crazies hiking through the night and snow.

Note: For a view of what I was imagining this morning’s sunrise would look like, check out week 109.