In the afternoon, after my morning shoot at Ogle Lake in Brown County State Park, I decided to go to Yellowwood State Forest, where I had shot last year and see how it looked this year.
I hiked the same trail that I had taken the previous fall, but this year I went a little further along the trail. Recent rains had muddied the trail, requiring some minor off trail work to bypass the worst of the mud.
On the opposite side of the lake from my starting point, I encountered a lone, barefoot female hiker, carrying her muddy hiking boots. It appeared that she had walked through some deep mud somewhere along her hike and maybe it was more comfortable to hike barefoot than to suffer in the mud invaded boots. She seemed to be carefully picking her way along, which was good, since there were plenty of natural things on the trail to stick, poke and gouge bare feet. I did not encounter her on my hike back to the parking lot, so I have to assume she made it out.
The lack of good peak fall color in the forest resulted in a disappointing photo shoot in the forest. Even though I was late for the previous year’s peak, the previous year’s shoot seemed more satisfying than this one.
I stood in a small stream crossing to get the shot above, which is about where I turned back last year on my first hike in this forest.
There were no really good places to get to the lake shoreline from the forest trail, so I had to shoot through trees towards the opposite shoreline.
Somewhere along the way, I managed to push through some brush to get near enough to the shoreline to get the image below. I still had to carefully zoom and position the camera to avoid much distracting parts of stray limbs and bushes intruding into the edges of this composition.
On the hike out, at a bridge crossing of a shallow creek, I encountered a photographer and a young couple, apparently getting engagement photos. The environment at this location and time did not look great for such photos, but I’m not that kind of photographer, so what do I know about that?
Maybe a quarter of a mile from the parking lot, I stopped at a short section of the trail that had been bridged over by a low wooden section.
As I finished a shooting here, the young couple and their photographer approached from behind. We exchanged greetings again and I continued to my vehicle.
When I arrived at my vehicle, I was not at all satisfied with this photographic outing, so I decided to hang around on a small, narrow, concrete boat dock until near sunset and hope to get something more interesting for my efforts today.
Stay tuned for more,
Ken
