Thankful Thursday

Welcome back!

This special edition of the weekly newsletter is brought to you this Thanksgiving Day in celebration of gratitude. In a newsletter called “Colorado HIGH SKY,” you can expect lots of great scenery. But what you might not expect is views of a city and its environs.

But I’m grateful for Denver! ♥️ Just this morning at sunrise, I took the following photo:

To see Denver in its best light, sunrises and sunsets make for the best photos. Of course, that makes for some special challenges, especially in winter. Once again, from the archives, here’s the first photo from that area that really inspired me to return, again and again. The rays of the sun over the hazy central Platte river valley illuminate a cold and sleepy city, with Sloans Lake appearing to point towards the sun itself.

I’m grateful that I have an archive of photos, for one. Let’s also celebrate “Throwback Thursday,” given this chance to return to the past. This next photo is from last year, when I returned to Panorama Park in Wheat Ridge. You might recognize the scenery, as it also helps Denver to be so aesthetically interesting!

This newsletter couldn’t live up to the name “Colorado HIGH SKY” without some pictures of mountains. And there will be a lot more where that came from! Just this morning, for example (if you don’t mind the repetition of scenes), I took another photo of Mount Blue Sky.

This time of year, weather is a major concern for travel and photography. A storm rolled in this week, bringing several feet of snow to the mountains, but only a few inches here in Lakewood. Once the snow stopped yesterday, the sky also cleared.

Looking to the east, a panoramic view of South Lakewood shows the encroaching shadows cast by the setting sun dropping behind the foothills. Using the “golden hour” for photography can show that even cities like Denver and Lakewood can be photogenic. And that’s what this newsletter is for!

Of course, I’d like to end with a special type of photograph taken at Randall Park in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. You might recognize the style as a “Tiny Planet.” Creating this style requires taking a number of photos, converting all the rectilinear coordinates into polar coordinates and then stitching them together. It would take a mathematician to explain, but I”ll just show you the results:

Thanks again for reading this all the way through! The regular edition of the newsletter returns on Monday.