After driving up and down the canyon a bit, I finally found a spot that looked good enough to stop and take some photos. I was still feeling great about all of this. Went to the stream, set up my shot, and started shooting away. It was awesome, despite me slipping into the water, several times. For some reason, those rocks were extremely slippery… more so than usual it seemed. So after shooting for about an hour (well, 30 min of shooting, 30 min of falling), I decided it was time for a new location. Packed everything up and started heading down the canyon. As I was driving down, I was looking around and up the mountain sides, and noticed quite a few trees were changing colors!! So exciting! Naturally, that just boosted my excitement by about ten fold. I was going to get my first fall shots, TODAY!!

So on a whim, I decided to head down to the Alpine Loop road that goes from the American Fork road down to the Provo Canyon road. Simply beautiful drive. If you’ve never done it, I highly highly recommend it. In the summer, it’s just amazing. In the fall… nothing can match it’s sheer beauty.

As I’m driving to the canyon, I start picturing all the amazing photos I’m going to capture. All the greens, yellows, reds, and oranges. An phenomenal combination of colors. One only nature can display in such awe. Well… I get down to Provo Canyon… with absolutely no photos. Yep, you guessed it. There were no autumn colors at all. At the most, there were probably just a handful of trees that had changed already. So, I guess I’ll just have to go down in a week or so. Hopefully we get a couple good cold nights so that they change.

When I get home, I’m still feeling pretty confident about the photos that I got from Millcreek Canyon earlier. I start transferring all the photos over to my computer, and can’t wait to look at them. As I open up Lightroom and import the photos… I can’t believe my eyes. No literally, I couldn’t believe my eyes. None of the images popped out at me. Did I really not capture one decent photograph?! What was going on? I was all pumped up, feeling like I was going to do great… and nothing?! Something can’t be right.

Often I find myself doing that. Feeling all excited about the photo adventure… and coming home with nothing like what I had imagined. Do I have too high of expectations? Do I judge myself too harshly? Both of those are correct. Let me show you why. Marc Adamus is my landscape photography hero. Every time I go out to shoot, I imagine his photos and want mine to look like his. But when I get home and see that mine don’t look anywhere near like his… I get disappointed. If you’re wondering why I feel this way, hop on over to his website and look at his gallery. They’re simply amazing. I can never get tired of looked at them.

Marc Adums

But, I guess all I can do is keep going at it. practice makes perfect, right? Another thing that I’ve thought about is maybe my gear isn’t holding up to my standards? So… starting today, I will officially be accepting donations towards my gear fund. Haha. You can donate via PayPal, or cash… I’m easy like that.

Anyways, enough typing, my hands are hurting. Here are the two photos that I got from my mis-adventure yesterday.

Thank you for reading and viewing.

Jeremy | Sur-Real Photography

Once I actually got up to Alexander Basin, it was fine though. It had just rained so everything was nice and freshly cleaned… plus it smelled wonderful. As I was getting my stuff set up a few hikers were coming down from Gobblers Knob, which then left me to be the only one on the entire mountain. It was awesome!

And then as I was getting ready for the following shot, I looked up to see a deer staring right at me. I stayed as still as I possibly could and the deer would go back to eating, but then snap it’s head back up to look at me. Just couldn’t quite figure out what I was. Haha. After about 15 min of the same thing… it finally bounced down the hill to graze elsewhere.

I didn’t quite get the shots I was hoping to get, but all in all, I’m pretty pleased with this trip. I don’t think I’ll be going back to Alexander Basin though, time for a new trail to explore!

Thanks for reading,

Jeremy | Sur-Real Photography