Photos

I'm sure there are 100 different places called Big Springs. I have images on TE from a couple of them. This one is located due east of Brigham Young University, over an 11,000 ft ridge and is at the end of about a 3 mile hike.

In this location we counted 3 distinct large springs, good size streams coming out of the hillside, and a number of smaller springs all over. The hillside is covered in aspen and ferns, and you can see in the ferns where elk had been bedding down.

The sky was very overcast, and it was quite dark. A snowstorm was on its way in, and we didn't hang around very long.

My vision for this image was not how it actually looked, there was much more there, and less too. My inclanation was to pre-visualize the image as a black and white, but there was enough interesting color to work in some color. I was fascinated by the local contrast of the aspen trees. The appeared to glow quite brightly, because of their color, although the ferns in the foreground had enough highlight to interfere.

So post processing was a must. I burned in the foreground so it wouildn't be as distracting, and I increased the contrast to an extreme level. I reduced the saturation and cropped the image. With the heavy contrast it was hard to get an USM that didn't look overly processed at the lowered resolution for TE.

Also, this image by far had more loss in .jpg size reduction than any other image I have played with. The color saturation and edge detail suffered tremendously.

When I exposed the image, I pushed the exposure to saturate the brighter areas, and used a medium contrast and medium sharpening setting on the camera.