About the Image(s)

Over the holidays I had the opportunity to visit a secret forest in the Sierra Nevada, just north and west of Lake Tahoe. Here, time slows down to a crawl, snow flakes gently drift down from the sky and pile up like giant white pillows, beckoning all who venture there to leave the busyness of their minds behind.

Photographers can capture the magic of this place with the right settings that allow the camera to record what the human eye too frequently does not see. Therein lies the beauty of Intentional Camera Movement. All the elements were present??”the freshly falling snow, the color contrast between the browns and greens of the trees and the pure white of freshly fallen snow. Cloud cover acted like a giant soft box and ensured an agreeable tonal range in the scene.

All I had to do was open my mind to this magical scene was slow down, look out the back porch of the home I was staying in and let my imagination wander a bit. Something about the geometry of the trees lining up with good spacing in between them added another appealing dimension. I let this image capture me with my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV and my EF 24-105 f/4L IS II at 105 mm. ISO set to 400. A gentle vertical movement with my camera at 1/5 second produced the result I was hoping to achieve. Image processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

John Muir understood the magic of these places when he famously said, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”