A Pleasant View

GALEN ROWELL: "You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: To call the view from Pleasant View Farm, atop Winchell Mountain, "pleasant," is to commit a felonious litotes. Much of this summer's explorations have taken me north, up the area known as, "The Oblong," on the border of New York and Connecticut. With the rising sun shining across Connecticut at my back, the view on this morning extends at least 40 miles. The most distant mountain in this image are in the southern Catskills on the far side of the Hudson River. Had I walked a few hundred feet south I could have looked east almost as far into Connecticut, but that's not where the view was on this morning.

As a breed, landscape photographers tend to be scavengers, combing the hills to rescue moments of sunlight, fog or cloud from the dissipations of time. Planned shots rarely are what one anticipates, but at Pleasant View I can count on finding rising valley fog on most mornings. I will return here often.

This panorama was made from three distinct images stitched in Photoshop. The original file has enough resolution to produce an image at least eight feet long.