In 2019 we were in Indiana the third week of October, which was at least one week early for the peak of fall color. So we scheduled our 2020 visit for the last week of October, which was projected to be the peak time for fall color there. Wrong! The peak came one or two weeks earlier in 2020, then storms the week prior to our visit, removed leaves from most of the mature trees. Fortunately, there were still a few trees, mostly the ones in the forest understory, with fall foliage remaining.
We stayed in a cabin a few miles from Brown County State Park, which is a popular place for fall foliage viewing. The first day in the cabin, I walked around the wooded area on which the cabin was located, making images of the remaining fall color.
It was windy and I was shooting handheld, so I used much higher ISO than I liked to get a sufficiently high shutter speed to freeze the motion of the leaves. Unfortunately, this results in noisy photographs.
I did what I could to reduce the noise, but there are tradeoff in this process. Too much noise reduction makes the fuzzy images even more fuzzy.
The high ISO can also result in blown out highlights in portions of images. I did not use graduated neutral density filters, since these are problematic in wooded areas with no clearcut line between bright areas and darker area in a composition. I did apply software ND effects, which helps, but software filters are not as good as real physical filters.
To avoid the blown out highlights, I sometimes eliminated the sky in compositions and sometimes cropped out as much of the blown out portions of the images as I could, while trying to maintain a “reasonable” composition.
I was not pleased with many of my photos, even most of the ones that I elected to process, due to these conditions.
And it did not help that I missed the peak color.
Continued later,
Ken