Boy, do we have a gout of photos to get through now! They’re going to be spaced out a bit, so perhaps they’ll last the week, but a few days at the least. And that still doesn’t count some (a lot of) video clips to edit together. So let’s get started.
This year we have a decent selection of fall colors, almost all of them local – and this was after I was concerned that we wouldn’t have many at all. The summer was hot and dry, which is rarely a good condition for the trees to turn brilliant, but right before the crucial point we got some heavy rains, and that might have done the trick. However, nearly everything that I have is a vertical composition – we’ll just have to cope.
This was actually earlier today, and the weakest one that I have (“Strong start, strong finish, Al,” yeah. hush,) but the conditions sprung up as I was there and I snagged a couple of quick frames. While the leaves are from a pin oak, that’s out of the frame, and the branches are the American tulip tree that had dropped nearly all of its leaves during the drought anyway.
The pond contributed to making a collection of fallen leaves three-dimensional, even when there wasn’t a lot of color to be had right there. But we have some photobombers…
Now that the duckweed is breaking up and not shielding the entire water surface, some of the pond denizens become visible, enhancing the depth aspect a hair.
This one was re-shot today, because the original didn’t quite have the lighting that I wanted:
Ehhh, okay, but not great, and the basking turtles that I wanted to be well-lit still don’t show up in the wider angle necessary to get the most color in there. We’ll see a variation of this in a later post, but right now, we’ll see another variation that I never intended but stumbled across while exploring, also today:
Same island, almost directly opposite – these leaves were shielded from view by the trees on the island itself. Also, this approach helps disguise the bare fact that most fall leaves look pretty tattered, and finding clean, photogenic ones can be a chore. This is demonstrated by the next composition:
This wasn’t on the property, or today, but the backlit colors popped up nicely while the leaves themselves looked like plague survivors from last century. That’s a nice mental image to provoke for the gallery, I’m sure…
But these are better:
I can’t be bothered to find out what species of tree this is – you want this to take forever? – but they look healthy at least. Or as healthy as leaves that are rotting away on the tree before falling and decaying to dust can possibly look. Which is pretty good, really.
One of the new Japanese maples, recently transplanted, is a spindly little thing right now yet produced the best autumn colors of them all – these leaves on on the same branch, the ones on the end changing to red first, and not too gradually either. You’ll see this tree again later on.
I admit to cheating with this one, since the image came up much more lackluster than it looked in person – I probably should have been bracketing the exposure, and this has showed in several other compositions as well. So I took the best and boosted saturation a little, getting a bit closer to what I was actually seeing, though this might be a tad too far. Still, it’s not overwhelming, and it’s not AI, simply Al.
And to close out today’s batch:
The bald cypress trees outnumber everything else (save for the bamboo) on the property, and show such a wide variation of colors for trees only a few meters apart. Are these leaves, or needles, or what? Regardless, you can see them turning from the tips inwards, and I liked this composition for the stark curving branches cutting through the colors – cypress branches are often curved, oddly.
That clears out a few, but not all of them and not the best – and who knows if I’ll snag some more in the interim? Don’t touch that dial!
[Go ask your grandfather what that means…]