Weekly commented photo # 28 - First visit to Grand Cret d'Eau mountain

First light on Grand Crêt d'Eau mountain - Haut Jura Natural Park

This is a scheduled post. While you read it i'm enjoying a very few days of holidays, probably around the lakes of Jura mountains.

The Grand Crêt d'Eau mountain overhangs the end of Valserine valley on the left side of the river. It's also the last (or first) summit of Jura mountains range. It also overhangs the Rhône river and it's really close to the Vuache mountain.

Visiting Grand Crêt d'Eau was a project i had for a long time. Even if summer is not (in my mind) the best season for landscape photography i decided to go there at dawn on monday. To prepare this first exploration i did a little of internet scouting looking for photos of the mountain and words about hiking there.
I didn't found any very beautiful image but some texts describing some nice walks.

So, on monday i walk up at 4 am, took my car and drove to Grand Crêt d'Eau.
Arrived at the end of the road, i left the car and follow my instinct to decide which path to take.
After a relatively short anf beautiful walk between forests and fields i arrived with the first real lights of the day on that place just before the Col du Sac.

I would have liked to look for a better point of view but i knew the light would stay like this just a very short time. So i stopped on the path took this image plus a couple of other similar ones and continued my walk.

A very short time after i arrived at the Col du Sac. The place is really beautiful and inviting but the light was ever too strong to give some very interesting images.
I pursued my explorations during about one hour in the mountain meadows trying to find nice point of views and to devine what would be the best time to come back for landscape photography.

As usual for first explorations i didn't made a huge harvest of interesting images but at least i came back with a few decent ones and more important with many ideas and a very large area to explore.

For people interested in technical things, this photo was done using a 0.9 (3 stops) soft GND filter and the raw file needed just a very few adjustments (done with Silkypix) to produce the final image.