Autumn - Part 1 – Local Color

Western Maryland (20 October 2006)

As I write this, it is raining and most of the leaves are on the ground.  Shame on me for not doing this sooner…it’s almost winter and I have not waxed lyrical about fall.  Anything I learned or tips I might pass along will have to wait until next year.

Autumn is a special time if you like taking outdoor pictures.  Every season has its look.  Summer is lush and green.  Winter can be stark and white.  Spring blooms are certainly colorful.  But fall is the season that can overwhelm you when it blankets the landscape with color all the way to the horizon.  Also, the autumn light is special.  The low angle of the sun can give an already colorful landscape an even warmer glow.

After Our Japanese Maple Let Go (20 November 2010)

Sometimes, the leaves on the ground are enough for a ‘keeper’ image of fall.

For reasons that escape me, our Maryland autumn got off to a disappointing start this year.  Then, the much-anticipated, mid-October week in northern Wisconsin was a bust as drought and excessive heat just brought all their leaves down after they turned brown.  However, after we returned home, the local color improved and I found myself noodling around the neighborhood, looking for shots to take.

There are some very nice, natural, areas here in Columbia, MD.   We are fortunate to be in a community that has preserved forest and riverfront areas, where the public can wander and see Mother Nature go through her annual change from green to colorful to bare.  This suits the Lazy Lout Photographer since he can emerge from his torpor on short notice and be in the middle of it in a matter of minutes.  Really, the best thing about nearby locales is that one can re-visit them to capture the fall changes under different conditions and lights.

Path in the Woods, Columbia, MD (31 October 2011)

One way I like to show woods is with a path in the image.    In other seasons, it can be the trail that leads you into the wilderness…with majestic trunks disappearing through the top of the picture and the understory vegetation providing character to the scene.  In autumn, the fallen leaves do that with color and texture.  As always, the final consideration has to be composition.  You want an aesthetic balance of the main subjects and shapes in the scene and for the path to easily move your eye through the photograph. 

Footbridge with Golden View (11 November 2011)

Sometimes, you only need one tree to make a picture.  
I thought it looked better with the footbridge geometry and
 the large trunk that frame the colorful leaves.

What I originally planned to do was select some recent, local shots and throw in a few tips about making better fall pictures.  Then I poured through some books and past issues of Outdoor Photographer to [a] confirm what I was going to suggest and [b] find some other ideas to pass along.  What this research did was [a] remind me that I don’t know very much at all and [b] there is so much more I can do to make a good autumn image. 

So, that means the autumn post will be two parts and it’s a prelude to next year.  Part 1 shows recent images from nearby and Part 2 will show autumn images from even better places I’ve visited.  If I’m smart, the second post will promise to get to more distant, scenic locales next year where I will work to make better fall pictures.

I believe that full sun is seldom the ideal light for fall colors.  It can be so bright and the dark shadows that result can challenge your light metering.  The result is high contrast pictures.  Inevitably, some areas of your image will be too bright or too dark and not show well.  Overcast days make for more uniform, diffuse light that shines evenly throughout the scene.  They also bring out a more saturated color from the vegetation.

The following pair of shots illustrates two points.  I visited the same wooded stream location on two days…one on a bright (but hazy) afternoon and the other when an early morning fog was lifting.

While the afternoon image has warmth and an autumn feel to it, there is a pretty wide range of brightness from the top of the scene (trees and sky) to the bottom (stream bed and rocks).   Even when I bracketed the shot and made three different exposures, this was the most acceptable and it needed some darkening after the fact.  The others were too bright above the water or too dark below the sky.

On the other hand, bright light and shadows were not an issue on the foggy morning.  While the warm colors are certainly muted, the brown forest floor and bare trees still say ‘autumn’.  Also, this foggy morning scene was shot with the white balance set in the AUTO mode.  What this scene could use to make it a real keeper is a single, small, full, accent of a tree that blazes with gold or red.  That would complete the picture.  Maybe next time I’ll find one.

Also, when it is overcast or foggy, the light can lose some color.  It was interesting to read guides from the days of film and see how often they suggest the use of warming filters to enhance the color of an autumn scene.  With digital cameras, the white balance settings will do that for you.  As I suggested in the March 18 post about how to add some color to a winter scene in Dublin, the ‘cloudy’ or ‘shade’ white balance settings will further warm up an autumn composition, as was the case with this first shot.

It depends on the look you seek.  Since the ‘film is free’, it only takes a few more minutes to shoot a special scene both ways and pick the one that suits your sense of the place.  Sometimes, subtle color makes for a better image than bold, striking color.

Centennial Lake near Sunset [14 November 2011]

Some guides will glibly say that it’s easy to get good autumn shots because the color is everywhere.  I prefer the advice that Paul Wiles gave in the October 1995 issue of Outdoor Photographer – look for the photograph you can make rather than a scene to record. 

I suggest this might be an example of ‘less is more’.  As I walked around one of our community lakes, the warm afternoon sun was getting lower in the sky and warmer by the minute.  The opposite side of the lake was glowing in many places.  Rather than try to include as much of that as possible, I zoomed in on this one shoreline tree, moved it off-center and included enough reflection on the water to add that additional element.

The next post will contain autumn shots from past adventures and other places.  If you like taking pictures outside, this is (or was) the season to do it.  Like the old Brooklyn Dodgers used to say after losing another World Series to the Yankees, “Wait till next year!”