Jim Salge Photography Blog

Franconia for sunset…

Alpenglow is truly magical light.

As the sun sets, the rays of light get longer and longer, filtering through more and more atmosphere. And the color gets softer and softer. It is often rendered most intense as it falls upon snow capped mountains after the valleys have gone dim. Moments of beauty and warmth before a long, cold winters night.

Northern New England missed out on ‘Snowtorious BIG’ ‘walloping’ the Mid-Atlantic states, but extended shield of high clouds from the storm, exiting at sunset provided the perfect window for strong alpenglow yesterday. After a great meet-up shooting ice and snow in Plymouth, NH with the NH Flickr Group, I headed north to the town of Franconia. I was hoping to shoot from Bald Mountain at sunset, but a bit of a cold kept me grounded, so I scouted roadside shots.

Coffin Pond is a roadside beauty in Sugar Hill. I’ve a few shots in my collection from there, and also have fond memories of my first summer in NH fishing from it’s shore. The view in summer is sub-par, but with the addition of ice, you can find some great views of the Franconia Ridge from the back side.

Waiting for the sunset, I was kept occupied by following the tale of a fox and a mouse imprinted in the shoreline of pond. I ate a few highbush cranberries frozen in the brush. I listened to the silence of the northern forest. And I had a little fun with the fine sugar snow:

 

The magic light came suddenly, and strongly, as the whole ridge seemed to be ablaze. Pictures can’t capture the intensity of the color and light on the mountain as the rest of the world falls to shadow…

 

And then it was gone. Not the light, but the mountain. Clouds came in and capped the view…and off I ran. There was a vantage I’d scouted a while back with a great view to Washington. Hope was that they were clear…and with a long lens to isolate the scene, I capped of a great, frantic half hour of shooting in Franconia.

 

I’ll be posting a few blogs this week on the meetup, of this morning on Lake Winnie, and of some technique for capturing great alpenglow…but this cold is requiring me to take a nap!

Thanks for reading!