• Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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This shot is an old panorama stitch image that I took near the Maroon Bells during our 2016 fall road trip to Colorado. We had spent a beautiful sunrise at Maroon Bells shooting the iconic fall sunrise scene at the lake and were on our way back to our hotel. I saw this small pond just by the roadside and there was still some great light on the Maroon Bells, so I decided to get out and try my luck. This shot is a 5 shop Panorama stitch image I made near a random pond with some great morning light on the beautiful Maroon Bells.

In all my years in landscape photography, I have learned that one of the biggest challenges is to properly catalog and maintain records of all your photoshoots. I have noticed a pattern in my workflow That causes me to miss out on some really cool images. I usually import all my images to my desktop into a folder with the name of the location and date. Once all the images are moved, I use my geotag app to tag all my images with their GPS coordinates. Once that is done the next step is an ad-hoc selection of images for processing. This selection is usually based on ease of process, I pick images that can be done just by processing through Adobe Camera Raw and keep more technical scenes like the one that needs panorama stitching or exposure blending for a later date. Sometimes we schedule trips relatively closer to each other and I forget about these images and they are not processed for publication. In the case of this photo, our trip to Utah in December meant that this panorama stitch image was largely forgotten. But these days I am revisiting my old photos and I am glad I found this one. Plus writing about this makes me curious about how you guys are managing all the wonderful shots you take and I would love to learn more about any insights.

• Theodore Roethke

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I took this shot a couple of years ago during our road trip to Colorado. The purpose of the trip was to properly enjoy colors of proper fall foliage. One of the spots we decided as a must have for the trip was to see the sunrise at the iconic location of Maroon Bells. These 14k ft mountain peaks provide a perfect reflection on the Maroon Lake and provide photographers with a perfect sunrise photo opportunity.

While I love a classic spot like the Maroon Bells, but a better challenge, at least for me, is to find an interesting composition that’s different from the iconic photo. I found this spot near the Maroon bells location and what attracted me to the composition was the interesting diagonal lines present naturally in the frame. Fall was pretty much over at this location by the time we reached but there were still some colors left on the aspens near the ridge. While we are all waiting for the new year and an exciting 2019 I hope everyone finds the path to conquer their mountains.

• Leonardo da Vinci.

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I took his shot while we were heading back to town from the spectacular maroon bells view point. I had eyed this small snowmelt puddle for its reflection potential earlier, but due to the darkness couldn’t really figure out the complete view. On our way back I could see the maroon bells reflected on the car’s side view mirror and decided to stop and head to the small pond for a reflection shot since we had almost now wind.

The scene at the pond was one of the most challenging dynamic range shot. I had to use a 3 stop ND grad filter and combine a 5 image hdr to get some detail in the sky and foreground. I would have liked a bit more detail to the left side of the image but this was the best I could do and get a natural balanced look.

• Michael Kennedy.

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I have always believed in planning my photography trips well in advance. This is mainly due to the fact that as I am getting older, extended vacations are difficult to come by and since my preferred mode of transportation for photo trips is by road getting free to do a proper trip gets rarer by the year. But fall of 2016 was interesting, as usual in that year during fall I was starting a new project and my wife had an important deadline to meet for work that made taking any time off seemed like an impossible scenario. But I jumped the gun a bit and bought some books about Colorado and started to map some of the destinations I wanted to see. My wife soon jumped in the fun and this became our destressing activity in the evenings.

As we started to visualize the trip and plot a plan, I got a job offer that would allow me to take a break in between jobs, and we decided to take the trip immediately after my wife’s deadline passed. Now, this was a week past the peak foliage peeping time for Colorado that year, but we got about 10 days for the trip and had one of the best road trips in while. This shot was taken near the iconic maroon Bells location, we were driving back after a sunrise shot when I noticed this small pool by the road. I knew that I have a better chance of getting a clean reflection shot here, especially with the grove of aspens around. I used a polarizing filter and a 3 stop ND filter to balance my exposure and stitched together two landscape shots to get a squarish composition. My original plan was to get the whole pond in the composition but there were some elements including an electric post that forced me to crop out some of those unsightly elements.