Well, despite my intentions of really getting out to explore my woods this fall, time constraints just haven’t let me get out there as much as I would like to yet. Miserable conditions and other obligations leave me to digging around my image archives at night for old images I want to bring to the site. This one is pretty old – obvious by its image id of WA483, shot on film (Agfa RSX!!) with a Nikon N70 in 1997. It is Manido Falls in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Penninsula. I was just browsing through my slide pages and it just stood out to me as having a great moodiness to it.
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I happened to stumble across Clayton Jones’ review of many different fine art papers recently. I found the entire page a great read, and picked up on a few new matte papers to try out. It is often hard to make a choice with so many papers available. If you stick to just one, perhaps you might not know if something out there is a bit better than what you are using. Clayton takes a very systematic approach to analyzing each paper and providing its benefits and things to watch out for. The page is dated from July, but a worthwhile find at any time. Take a look..
http://www.cjcom.net/articles/digiprn5.htm
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Since much of Clinton River park is in a floodplain, there are no shortages of small ponds to explore..
And sometimes it isn’t necessarily color that catches my eye, but isolated shapes and details..
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This year I am considering imposing a restriction on myself as far as photographing fall colors. Last year I drove 10 hours away to photograph fall colors in the Smoky Mountains and Hocking Hills and spent little time right out my own back door. While walking my malamute through the woods today, I decided I needed to spend more time getting to know them during fall. Already interesting things are starting to happen there. So this year, I am going to shoot fall only in the woods around my house – all walking distance. I’ll also take it as a challenge, because I have no grand landscapes around my home, only small intimate settings like above. I’ll consider it my anti-grand-landscape-get-to-know-your-woods project.Â. This was shot a couple of years ago, about a 20 minute walk from my back door. Save gas, save time, and get to know my woods a little better – sounds like an overall good plan to me.
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Fall Color season is upon us, who knows what this season will bring as far as the variety and intensity of color we will see this year. I have read some reports that the colors this year may be less vibrant due to a lower than normal rainfall this summer. These reports often have to be taken with a grain of salt because they are generalized, and what may apply to one area may be the complete opposite for the next. I have basically quit worrying about what the color will be like, because there will be some, no matter what the previous season was like. And who knows what other surprises the weather may have for us?
This image was shot last fall in the Smokey Mountains. I went down the last week in October, when supposedly fall colors are peaking there. Well, last year, fall colors peaked about 2 weeks later than normal time. There was some color to be found, but no where near the abundance near peak times. However, during this time, due to a front created by Hurricane Wilma at the time – a surprise snow storm happened in the upper elevations of the mountains. It closed the central road through Great Smoky Mountains National Park down for the better part of a day. So my immediate reaction was disappointment, because I might not be able to reach some of the more scenic overlooks of the park. Who knew a Hurricane was going to cause this during this week?
However, the roads did eventually open as the snow began to melt. Some of the snow covered hillsides made for some beautiful scenery, particularly when contrasted against either snow-free pines or what little color had started. In the end, I made off with some images I was happy with, despite the pre-peak of fall colors which was the main purpose for the trip. When the colors did peak, who knows if another snow fall would hit at the right time allowing for similar or better images?
These situations seem to come up from time to time – like waiting for light at sunrise or sunset, a cloud bank to clear, or an animal to do this or that. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it explodes at the very moment we think about leaving. We can try to place ourselves in the right place at the right time, but a lot about nature remains completely out of our control. Patience and flexibility then become some of a nature photographer’s greatest assets.
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