The Forgotten Summer

I headed back to Mt. Rainier again yesterday to see if, by September 1st, the legendary wildflowers were likely to bloom at all this year.  Apparently not: the meadows around Paradise are still dotted with snow, the heaviest in years. Many of the flowers are still just emerging from winter, and with autumn in the air, I doubt they will have enough time. For them, summer never happened.  Maybe they’ll have better luck next year!

So instead of photographing flowers, I stuck around long enough to take some shots of the fading light of sunset.  I chose not to shoot the classic shot of the mountain but to concentrate on details, light and shape.

For this second shot, I remembered Galen Rowell’s comment about seeing nice light and then running around madly trying to put something in front of it. That’s pretty much what I did here.  Moving quickly, I found some trees and tried to balance all the shapes into a coherent composition before the light vanished. Within a few minutes, the light was gone, and I started the long drive home.

Nikon D3, 70-200mm lens