Autumn Aspens. Obviously, angle is everything here, and Peter chose this angle not only to put the golden light of the late afternoon sun to work for him, but also because it was just about his only choice. "This is in the High Sierras of California, in a very dark canyon, so there were not a lot of possibilities," Peter says. Although sunlight was doing most of the illumination work, he used his SB-800 Speedlight to highlight the golden leaves of the aspens "to give a little sparkle to the setting." He considers those golden leaves "the stars of the show."
You can make the case that every picture in fact tells two stories: first there's the story the picture conveys—could be a sports story or a nature story, a news story or the story of a trip to the amusement park, but in all cases there's another tale to tell, and that's the story of the picture, the story that tells us what choices the photographer made, what he was thinking about and how his experience came into play. And you can make the case that it's the second story that helps us become better photographers.
We recently saw a selection of images by the versatile photographer Peter Hemming and thought his images perfectly proved our two-story case.