It's a stunning color image captured by Colrain photographer Patric duBreuil, yet the subtle contrasts of grays are what stand out most.

Another photo at the same location, actually a panoramic composite of nine images, offers a sweeping view taken just downstream from the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls. Apart from the bridge, appearing faintly green in the murky light on Dec. 6, and a pink State Street building and the yellow Salmon Falls Artisans Showroom, "Above the Dam" appears to be devoid of color.

The collection of landscape images by the prolific duBreuil capture an array of spectacular views of not only Shelburne Falls and more rural areas around western Franklin County, where he's lived for decades, but also of Alaska, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert and western Canada. They are exuberant, mostly untouched, photos of nature, capturing the joy of the terrain we sometimes fail to notice.

"My pictures are happy pictures," said the white-bearded, 58-year-old photographer, wearing a signature headband to contain his long, wispy hair.

DuBreuil, whose family bought his home 50 years ago for vacations and respite visits from New York, moved here permanently at age 18.

He attended Greenfield Community College and worked in construction, helping to build the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage hydroelectric project and Crumpin Fox Golf Course.

He began taking photographs as a hobby at age 12, but it wasn't until 1997 that he began "compulsively" using his camera to deal with his insomnia.

"I had nothing to do at 3 in the morning," he recalls. "For the first time, I got to see the sunrise with a clear head."

Early each morning, duBreuil would take his 35 millimeter camera and his tripod out to favorite haunts around Colrain, Shelburne and Halifax, Vt. The darkness gave way to daybreak, and he marveled at the sky's transition, minute by minute, as the sun began to break on the horizon.

"I was out there shooting film like there was no tomorrow," the photographer said, "and I got really, really beautiful pictures. That's where it basically got rolling."

It's still rolling, with duBreuil posting startling, mostly unaltered, images on the World Wide Web when the shutterbug gets him.

There are only a few words to describe the breathtaking pictorial poems duBreuil weaves of sun, sky and clouds through patience and persistence: magnificent, spectacular, awesome. But the there are seemingly an inexhaustible cache of images on two of his three Web sites, http://www.patricdubreuil.com and http://www.penguin-works.com

"First morning light breaks across the frozen pond at Pine Hill Orchards, Greenfield-Shelburne Road, Colrain, Massachusetts," reads the description for one showing a heart-shaped sun peering out from a thicket of trees.

Driving down Coombs Hill Road to kill time after shooting a sunrise but before Pine Hill Orchards opened for breakfast, duBreuil spotted a cloud coming in from the east, along with a thick mist.

"See how the sky is developing?" the photographer tells a visitor as he goes through a sequence of frames, with all of the enthusiasm of a child witnessing the wonder of a morning sky for the first time. "Look at that red. See that sparkle? You've got a perfect cross. It's 'The cross in the sky.'

"It was the farthest reaches of the world,' he said. "It was really pioneer, really beautiful. When you see something like that it's just 'Wow.' And this was just Fairbanks."

When Congress approved construction of the oil pipeline in 1974, duBreuil was ready. He'd kept his camera close at hand while working as an 18-year-old on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, capturing hundreds of shots of cables and steel. During the 21/2 years he spent working on the pipeline, took plenty of photos to bring back east.

The online images, with majestic, snow-capped mountains in the distance, show what Valdez looked like three decades ago.

DuBreuil returned twice, "to see if I could capture the ambiance of the wilderness I found the first time.'' he said. ''Of course it wasn't there. Fairbanks was no longer a pioneer town where the most modern building was a four story Penney's department store. Now it's like Springfield, with shopping malls and plazas. North Pole, which was this little post office of nothing is now a strip of fast-food places catering to the Air Force base. It's gone.''

"The closest I found (to the ambiance he remembered) was in Dawson City (Yukon). The streets are still gravel and the sidewalks are still made of planks," he said. "Even though it's a tourist town, it's real."

The 10,865 images duBreuil captured during the two-month recent trip, some mundane but many dramatic shots that capture the grandeur of the landscape, show the beauty of digital photography.

"This is pop, pop, pop,' he said. "The wonderful thing about digital is that you can take so many different shots of the same thing," sometimes capturing changing light conditions.

Thinking back on the using the 35 millimeter camera he used to use before switching to digital photography two years ago, he said, "it's the difference between moving a mountain with a teaspoon instead of using a bulldozer."

The quality of images, he said, is "impeccable," even using a fairly inexpensive digital.

The nine-panel "Morning Mist over the Deerfield" panorama was shot after duBreuil's gas fill-up at the Neighbors in Buckland. He was "killing time" before grabbing breakfast at the Bridge Street Cafe. He pulled his car over across from McCusker's Market and began shooting.

"I came home and said, 'Hey, this is something,'" he said. "To me, it's striking."

A striking image of Buckland Pizza by night, with its neon-lit storefront reflected on his car roof where he had the camera perched, resulted from an unexpected turn of events.

The Christmas Day blizzard of 2002 was also captured in scenes shot around the village, for the enjoyment of Web surfers.

"If it looks interesting, I'll shoot it," duBreuil said. "If it looks like a piece of art, I'll shoot it very, very carefully..."

Although his portraits of nature and village life are for sale, most of the images are free offerings on the World Wide Web.

"You can follow my road trips around town after a blizzard," he says with a laugh. "This is the thing local people love, and they send the links to family members. It's my quiet gift to people."