Category : Colorado

Colorado is not one place photographically, it is four. The Front Range foothills west of Denver and Boulder sit between five and eight thousand feet, with rock, pine and a plain below them. The high country — Vail, Aspen, Estes Park, Granby — runs from eight thousand feet up, where the air is thin enough to change the light measurably and the year is short at the green end. The ski mountains add a second elevation on top of that, which turns one venue into two. And the western slope beyond the divide is desert: red sandstone, cottonwoods, dry heat and skies dark enough to see the Milky Way.

What unites them is altitude and dryness, and both are working conditions rather than scenery. A third less atmosphere overhead at nine thousand feet means the hardest sun and the deepest shadows in this guide, so full shade stops being advisable and becomes mandatory — and most of what grows here is lodgepole pine, which dapples rather than shades. Dry clear air means a long lens compresses distant ranges without haze, which is why mountain frames work here and not in humid country. It also means afternoon convection almost daily from July into September, and lightning on exposed high ground is Colorado's defining outdoor risk rather than a footnote.

Each guide below names the shade, the hour, the exposure decision and the covered alternative. We have not photographed at every venue here, and where we have not, we say so.