In Brown County State Park I walked along a creek capturing fall color alongside the creek bed.
Having an interest in geology, I had to include some of the rock layers exposed along the creek bed.
There were only a few shallow puddles of water in the creek, so walking in and along the creek bed did not require getting my feet wet.
More fall in Indiana later,
Ken
A continuation of photos captured during a morning hike in the Charles C. Deam Wilderness area of the Hoosier National Forest, Indiana.
That’s it for this hike.
Until next time,
Ken
To find places to get out into nature and find prospective places for outdoor photography, I frequently look at maps, either paper maps or digital maps with satellite views. Using this method I found that the Yellowwood State Forest was only a few miles from the cabin, where we were staying. So I had to take time to explore that area.
There is a sizable lake in Yellowwood State Forest with a trail that goes around the lake. The first part of the trail beginning at a parking lot was not of great interest. It was sandwiched between the lake and a roadway for maybe a half mile before it began to depart from the roadway at the end of the lake.
Near where the trail turned away from the roadway, I found an old dead tree that looked like a good photography subject.
On the opposite side of the lake from the parking area, a branch went away from the lake; but I continued along the trail that followed the lake shoreline. The trail became more scenic there with the lake on one side and deeper woods on the other side.
It was a little early in the afternoon for the best light for outdoor photography, so including any portion of the sky produced unpleasant results and I did not try to use any filters, while shooting handheld. I posted a cropped version of the hiking trail image (above) on Flickr. I think you will agree that taking out the sky improved this image.
I found the growth pattern of the vine in the above photo interesting. Why did it make those right angle turns? It eventually went up the tree in the normal direction. Maybe it got its directions from Apple Maps.
I began to look for ways to exclude the sky from my compositions. Sometimes portions of the sky were necessary to get the desired parts of the landscape into my compositions with my lens of choice, then I cropped the sky out in post processing.
There is also a cropped version, isolating the back lit leaves on the forest floor, of the image above on Flickr.
The toadstool image here is a cropped version of one that is posted to Flickr. I thought that there were distracting parts of the original image, so I severely cropped it; but I actually still prefer the original version.
Fall in Yellowwood State Forest, Indiana
The portions of my images from this trip that include the upper parts of the larger, more mature trees, show the lack of foliage on them. This would have been a much more successful visit for outdoor fall photography had I been here a few days earlier; but that is the gamble one makes, with long range planning. One has to adapt and being outdoors in natural surroundings is always a joy.
Thanks for following,
Ken
I left Ogle Lake and drove back towards the main roadway. I stopped at a pull out before getting to the main route and walked along the roadway to shoot more just off the road. As I walked beside the road I came to a trail, so I decided to take a short walk along the trail.
The trail was covered with fallen leaves along much of the route that I walked. The trail is just barely discernible in the lower left of the image above.
It was mostly overcast on this day. The dullness of the sky in the background gives the images too much of a fuzzy look for my taste; but it was what I was given today.
My short walk along the trail turned into a longer hike than I had planned. The trail meandered through the forest with frequent changes in direction, eventually following high above a ravine. The trail followed the ravine for quite a way, then crossed the ravine, then went along side the ravine in the opposite direction. I eventually came to a junction in the trail near a park roadway. I walked out of the woods to the road. I did not know which road I was on, but I knew the direction I needed to go to find my vehicle. I walked the roadway to a junction, which turned out to be the route to Ogle Lake. I only had to walk a short distance along the road towards Ogle Lake to my vehicle.
On my way out of the park I stopped to shoot at an overlook.
That’s it for this shoot,
Ken
After stoping at a number of pull outs along the main roadway in Brown County State Park, I continued to Ogle Lake and hiked the loop trail that goes around the lake.
At the end of the lake nearest the parking lot, I went off the trail down to the waters edge to get this image:
I walked along the edge of the lake towards the north until I got back to the official trail, where I stopped to photograph reflections in the lake.
There were not many others here today, so it was not difficult to keep a safe distance from others and I only had to standby occasionally to let others clear out of my compositions.
At least a couple of hikers asked what I was photographing. The first to ask seemed to think that there must be something special that was not apparent along the trail to photograph. The second was a photographer with a long lens. He was photographing birds and thought I must be doing the same. I guess we all have our own thoughts about what is worthy of photographing.
As I rounded the end of the lake and began to hike along the south side, I noted some very nice reflections on north side of the lake.
The reflections in the lake seemed to me to be the best images that I’ve gotten so far and I struggled to make interesting compositions for the rest of the hike.
That’s it for the Ogle Lake area,
Ken
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
