Sometimes you make photos just for fun. On a day of driving through Colorado in the summer of 2007 I chose a route from one client location to another that would take me through Rocky Mountain National Park. It was a rare opportunity to see some of the park even though I didn’t have time for anything other than the drive. Edward Abbey would be disappointed, I know, but Colorado in June of 2007 was a work trip and there was a budget motel waiting for me to turn my camera to it somewhere west of Steamboat.
On these trips, where projects were scheduled daily for 30 days or so, getting a whole day to travel from one location to another seemed like a luxury and a license to explore a little and shoot some personal pictures. I am sure my colleagues from that period and I shot tens of thousands of images of our meals, accommodations, our rental cars, ourselves and the roads, like rivers, taking us from one town to another across the United States. We shot roadside monuments, famous grave sites, long forgotten churches and everything else you can image finding at the roadside of American Highways. This day, however, was different because I got to meander through Rocky Mountain National Park, a place of true and spectacular natural beauty and home to a variety of wildlife.
This little guy, Marmota flaviventris, goes by many names, The Yellow Belly Marmot, Whistle Pig and Rock Chuck among them and made a great subject to focus my camera on while I stretched my legs after pulling off one of the highest altitude roadways in the Americas. It was stunning and I felt lucky to be up there. Sometimes it’s fun to shoot without intention or purpose, to shoot just because. I enjoy looking through my archive for images like this to remind myself that even when I am shooting daily for clients, I need to snap a few frames just for me.
Elysium Photo by Rob Shaer 