It was early in the season for fall colors.  Finding peak color is a hard thing to time, when you’re planning to schedule time off from your normal duties, and it is complicated by different elevations, the direction of the slopes, and the weather -- both at the time of the shoot as well as during the summer before it.  I knew that a storm was coming, and wondered if it might be severe enough to taint the colors (or the trip up the canyon to get there), so I decided to proceed with my plan to shoot.

 

I was greeted with wind, rain, 1-inch diameter hail, and then a little calm.  I was already completely drenched after 5 hours of this, but decided to press on to an area just past Tibble Fork Reservoir in American Fork Canyon, Utah.  The lighting was flat from the cloud cover.  There were a few drops falling here and there, but nothing too daunting.  I was able to set up a tripod on some rocks right in the middle of this stream.  I took this vertically as well, but liked the sweeping left-to-right quality of this horizontal shot.  The lighting was sufficiently low that I didn’t need much neutral density (just a polarizer) to get a timed exposure.  I took 3 exposures, each with a different shutter speed.  0.6s was not quite enough movement; 5.0s was too much.  2.5s (f/16) turned out to be “juuuust right”.  Shot at 22 mm focal length with a Canon EF 20-35mm f/2.8L lens.