Spring Aspens and Sunlight
Colorado

20×20″ prints are $1,500
30×30″ prints are $3,000

In the spring of 1990 I found myself photographing in Colorado. I had been selected to do a book that combined the poetry of Robert Frost with my photographs, to be published by the Henry Holt company. The book was to be titled “Seasons” with poems and images in four sections, one for each season. The photographs were not intended to illustrate specific poems but to complement groupings of Frost’s poems which had been selected for each season.

I was putting together sequences of images to be used in the book but found I was a bit shy of photographs made in the spring. I had made some new photographs in Oregon but felt I needed a few more images to make the Spring sequence work. Thus this photograph, the only one I’ve made for a specific project (although I would have made it regardless).

The aspen leaves were just beginning to come out, it was the middle of the day with bright sun and this group of aspen trees had particularly white trunks. Aspen trunks can vary from white, gray or shades of greenish-gray or brownish-gray, depending on the individual grove of trees.

I used my Zeiss 250mm lens on my Hasselblad camera to make this image on Fujichrome 50 film and printed it in 1992 as I was working on the book layout. The Superachromat lens has remarkable sharpness and perfect color rendering with no aberrations. The delicacy of the light gold leaves and very subtle colors throughout the trunks is reproduced wonderfully in the Cibachrome prints.

It’s a luminous image full of light which brings to mind one of my favorite poems by Frost: “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower, but only so an hour…”