Oct. 4, 2023. 4:30pm. -- Back in July 2011, Jean & I were Jeeping with our friends Bill and Dianna on the Ophir Pass Road when I noticed some bent Aspen trees along the road apparently bent by avalanches cascading down the sides of the mountains. At the time I found it interesting but didn't give photographing them much thought. In 2022 while researching photo locations in SW Colorado I saw photos of these trees and recalled having seen them in 2011. I did some more research and soon discovered that the exact location was a well kept secret with the closest location description as being east of Ophir on the Ophir Pass Road. Because I had a general idea where to look for them, I made plans to find them and shoot a gigapixel wall mural of them during our fall photo tour for 2023. My wife Jean and I drove to the area on our first day in the area. After a good bit of wandering up and down the Ophir Pass Road in the area I had seen bent trees in 2011, I noticed a fellow photographer with her tripod setup some 30 yards off to the side of the road. When I looked to see what she was photographing I immediately spotted the trees. Known as the Bent Aspens or the Dancing Aspens they make for a very interesting composition. I parked the Jeep and took my gear down to where the other photographer was setup. I setup my tripod and began to shoot a set of photos. But that afternoon getting a gigapixel shot was not in the cards. Rapidly changing light caused by lots of clouds drifting overhead and a strong breeze that kept the Aspen trees waving in the breeze making shooting a focus stacked set of images impossible. I decided to bag it for the day and come back on another day. Five days later we went back and we had clear skis with no pesky clouds. I setup my gear and spent the next hour and 45 minutes shooting the set of images that went into creating this mural.

This is a focus stacked & stitched image shot with a Canon R5, Canon 300mm f/4.0 lens at f/11, 1/640th sec. exposure, ISO 400. It is made up of 9724 images with all of the images being Focus Bracketed images processed to yield 299 individual Focus Stacked images, 13 rows x 23 columns 30% overlap in portrait orientation.

The original image is:

5.49 Giga-pixels
65,161 x 84,306 pixels
217" x 281" 300 PPI (18 ft. X 23 ft., 5in.) un-cropped image size