Andrew, Even at about 09:00, when I left Manitou Springs, a thunderstorm was building over Pikes Peak. It was a youthful thunderstorm, but it was rising at a phenomenal rate. By the time I got to Vindicator Valley, about 45 minutes later, on the western side of Pikes Peak, the whole area behind me was obliterated by the storm, and the clouds you see here were offshoots of the activity. I parked and rushed to the spot I wanted to be in for this shot, set up the tripod, hooked up the cable release, set the camera on mirror-up, and started shooting. I made a dozen shots at various apertures, and by the time I finished the last one the sun was gone for the day. There's very little post-processing in this shot: a couple small slider movements in ACR, a default high structure B&W conversion in Silver Efex Pro, and a default sharpening in Nik's output sharpener set for the monitor.
And Eric: Vindicator Valley is a wonderful place a few miles east of Cripple Creek where the Cripple Creek and Victor mining company and Teller County have gotten together to leave -- I almost said "preserve," but that would be an overstatement -- at least a bit of the turn of the twentieth-century Cripple-Creek gold-mining environment. You can walk through the whole area -- a two mile path that winds up and down several hundred feet around a dozen or so abandoned mines and mining structures like the one in this picture. This is the largest one, and the Theresa mine is the most beautiful one. I've been shooting pictures in the Cripple Creek area since 1965, long before Vindicator Valley was set aside, and long before the mining company began raping the little valleys outside Vindicator. I have pictures of dozens of structures that are long gone, including a bunch of shots from Cripple Creek long before the town was ruined by the "gaming industry." I even have a picture of a tiny ghost town named Elkton that's now beneath about a thousand feet of mine tailings.
