I visited Brown County State Park on the second day of our Fall of 2020 visit to Indiana, where I photographed near a number of pull outs along roadways through the park and while hiking a couple of trails in the park.
This post will consist of the photos made near the roadway.
Thanks for following,
Ken
This post contains more of the images that I made in the wooded area around our cabin in late October, 2020.
A few, but not all, of the images in this post have been uploaded to my Flickr page. More about this visit to Indiana to come,
Ken
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
I ventured back into the forest on the morning of September 24, 2020, initially taking a similar path to the route I had taken the previous afternoon, wanting to see how the light and forest scenes would differ in the morning light.
Sometimes I photographed essentially the same scenes, which looked a little different with the light coming from a different direction.
There is something magical about being in a forest with sunlight filtering through the leaves and the tree trunks creating bands of shadow and light and
fallen tree trunks creating an array of geometrical shapes.
With all the big trees, back lighted leaves and starburst effects, it is easy to overlook the myriad small details. There are often interesting little things that make good images.
The juxtaposition of color and texture in small items can be as intriguing as a wide angle image of the forest.
Autumn is my favorite time of the year. I like the colors of fall and the crispness and smell of fall. Yet it is also a strong reminder of our mortality. I’m wondering, do we become more colorful in our autumn or just wrinkled and weathered?
To be continued,
Ken
I began my late day photography in the Rio Grande National Forest by walking briefly through the forest near my campsite before crossing FSR 380 into the forest on the opposite side of the roadway.
The first image here is a shot down FSR 380, just past my campsite. It is obvious from this image that there are some Aspens in peak fall color, while many others are just beginning to show signs of changing from green to yellow.
Aspens tend to grow straight and tall, self pruning as they gain height, but some grow in strange ways, such as this one on the right side in the image above, with the loop at top, where it turns sideways.
Aspen trunks have always fascinated me. They are usually tall, slender and grayish-white with hints of green and sometimes other colors, with smooth to rough trunks with dark black marks, where limbs have fallen off as the trees matures.
A forest is also a good place to get a starburst effect; but I think the one in the image above is too large and distracting. A smaller aperture would have given a smaller, sharper starburst.
I do not know what made the curved traces on the two trees in this image, but they are remarkably like data plots that I interpreted as a part of my work before my retirement. I posted this image on LinkedIn, where I knew others would see those traces as I did, and as of this writing it has received 15,275 views, 252 likes and 56 comments.
The small Aspens in full color beneath the much taller ones were eye-catching.
A skyward view beneath the tall Aspens can be awesome, especially if the Aspens are in full fall color, with the yellow leaves set against a blue sky. There is a full range of color in the images here, since “peak” color is not yet here.
Even without the peak color, the aspen trunks with green and yellow foliage and scattered evergreens beneath them provide beautiful fall forest scenes.
To be continued,
Ken
After breakfast this morning, I decided to drive on FSR 250 back towards Platoro Reservoir. I found a convenient pull out and entered the forest on the south side of the roadway. I wandered around in the forest shooting photographs in the mid-morning light.
The curved trunk Aspen in the photograph above appeared to be bowing to acknowledge its fall performance.
Forest are always good places to get a starburst effect through the trees, so I had to capture a few of these with the fall color.
This unfortunate Aspen shows damage from the violent storm that blew through here in early September. Readers might also note many downed branches in some of my photographs in this area.
The tall, slender Aspen trunks always make good subjects. It is not unusual to find a group of Aspens growing in a clump.
As I worked my way downhill from my parking place, I came out of this Aspen grove at a portion of the same road that had switched back below the hill.
There is a road sign in the bottom left of this image, indicating that I was very near the junction of two forest service roads.
At the edge of the forested area I found a large “hump back” Aspen.
Rather than walk back up the hill to my vehicle, I decided to walk along the roadway.
Trees near the roadways are susceptible to having graffiti carved into them.
The roadway made a great leading line, so I used that in a number of images as I worked my way back towards my vehicle.
The rest of the story later,
Ken
