Hello friends, it’s me, the human writer who technically owns this site and theoretically writes material for it. We all know AIs are now doing a lot of the writing in this world, and I have certainly been using AI a lot to do chores like “write me a blog post” and “build me a beaver simulator.” I will even admit that several of my last written posts on this site have been “assisted” by AI tools that probably deserve more credit, but so far I’ve held off on using AI to make generative edits to my photos. And that issue has brought me back to my keyboard, which I am actually typing on with my own human fingers and not letting some AI do the work. My photos are all hand-crafted by me, but does that still make sense in our age of AI wonders? Did it ever make sense? Let’s take a deep dive.

Sometimes you find a great photo you didn’t expect in a wonderful location. While visiting family in Pagosa Springs in 2015, I had an idea to take sunset photos on Piedra Road north of town. On one evening in particular, I raced out after the conclusion of a family event and arrived just in time to see the sun had already set. Despite the missed opportunity, I was able to capture a different kind of beauty – an ethereal blue hour shot.

South Park, Colorado is real and it’s wonderful! No, it’s not the quirky two-dimensional town you see in the Comedy Central TV show. Instead it’s a high valley, covering 1,000 square miles of grassland, and situated between the Front Range and the Mosquito Range in central Colorado. It’s here that you can often find some of the most incredible contrasts between grassy planes, mountains, and Colorado’s spectacularly changing weather.

In 2018, I did a solo backpacking trip to Quartz Lake in Colorado’s South San Juan Wilderness. When planning this trip, I had in mind three photos – a sunset, nighttime, and sunrise photo. I’ve already posted two photos from this trip before – the nighttime photo showing Mars and the Milky Way and the sunrise photo showing the surrounding ridges over Quartz Lake. This photo is the third from the series – the sunset photo taken shortly after I had arrived at the campsite.

When I lived in Colorado, I loved driving from Denver to the Rocky Mountain National Park to hike and take photos. One of my favorite spots was the Forest Canyon Overlook, which I featured in another photo I shared a while back. This overlook from the top of the spectacular Trail Ridge Road offers unparalleled views of the surrounding mountains, valleys, and tundra, making it a must see location for any landscape photographer.