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
By the time this final post, covering my fall visit to the Rio Grande National Forest, is published it will be late spring of 2021. It would have been good to have been able to publish all of the fall photographs in the fall, but it takes time to review and edit so many photographs and there are always other trips, events and personal matters that delay getting posts prepared.
Maybe I should take fewer photographs? But photography of natural places is my hobby and I get to do too little of it as is, so I will continue to make as many photos like these as often as I can get away to do so.
I’ll finish with a final photograph that I think is appropriate for wrapping up this trip.
The heart shaped scar on this tree appears to be natural and not one of the many carved ones that I encountered.
As soon as I publish this, I will begin preparations for another trip to begin in a few days. I have much to do and still have to select a primary destination. Maybe by next year, I will even be posting photos from that trip. (I still have other events in the queue to work through before getting to anything new)!
Thanks for following, stay well and safe,
Ken
Again, mostly photographs and few words.
Just one comment to wrap up this post. Viewers will note that I’ve include color versions of a few images that were then converted to black and white with selective colorization to add emphasis.
Stay tuned for the wrap up for my September 2020 Rio Grande National Forest visit.
Ken
For our late day shoot, we decided to drive back into a higher elevation portion of the forest. I’ll refrain from using too many words to wrap up the final shoot of my last day here, so these last several posts will consist of mostly photographs.
To be continued,
Ken
I continued to shoot, under the overcast sky, in an upper elevation Aspen forest, where the ground was covered with fall leaves and an abundance of old logs and stumps of fallen trees.
The stump above reminds me of the skeleton skull of a longhorn steer that one might find in a desert setting.
I found a batch of young evergreens among the large Aspens decorated by fallen Aspen leaves.
This wraps up the mid-day exploration and shoot and I want to remind viewers that the images look much better on the website or on Flickr (if posted there) and on a large screen, rather than in an e-mail or small mobil device screen.
Thanks for following and stay tuned for the final late day shoot,
Ken
After our morning shoot, my son wanted to explore some of the other Forest Service Roads nearby, so we drove along several of those and into higher elevations, where most of the trees had already lost most of their leaves.
It was an overcast day and the dispersed light was good for photographing in the forest.
With the trees mostly bare, the forest floor was covered in fallen leaves.
A vertical shot with a wide angle, standing to the side of a batch of Aspens, made those trees appear at an angle, rather than vertical.
I found many stumps of old fallen trees with the roots sticking out at various angles that made interesting subjects.
And old logs covered with fallen Aspen leaves.
To be continued,
Ken
Looking for small details in a vast forest, sometimes one finds natural abstracts.
This weathered tree stump with map like contours caught my eye. Here is a black and white conversion:
The Aspen leaf in this photo had not quite completed its color transformation, before it fell to rest upon a mossy bed.
I prefer to photograph these little details as I find them; but sometimes I’m tempted to move things around. I did not move anything in the photo above; but I can’t help but wonder, if I should have. Should I have removed the blade of grass pointing at the Aspen leaf in the middle? Or does that blade of grass serve as a useful pointer in this photograph? Would this image be better, if I had cleared away some of the debris around the edges or the scattered leaves, leaving just the single leaf in the center? What about that little twig resting on the stump to the left of the center leaf?
I have no objection to “posing” a natural scene for artistic purpose and I have removed man made items from natural scenes and I’m quite ok with this. I’ve occasionally removed a twig, a fallen tree limb or a blade of grass, if I thought those were distracting in a scene. But nature is not perfect, so will “cleaning” a scene make it unreal? Is unreal ok in this sense? No one would know the scene has been modified, if not so informed by the photographer. Is it acceptable to “manufacture” a natural scene?
And I will wrap up this portion of this morning’s photos with one final forest image, which I just noted this morning was chosen for Flickr’s Explore page.
Stay tuned for the rest of today’s story,
Ken
This post is a continuation of photography in the Rio Grande National Forest, Colorado during the final morning of photography this September.
Many of my photos from today are of more of the small details seen in a forest.
Stay tuned for mid-day and afternoon of our final day in the Rio Grande National Forest,
Ken
We went into the forest that surrounded our campsite again this morning. It is getting more difficult to find scenes that are significantly different than others that have already been photographed.
I’m drawn to the geometry created by the old, fallen tree trunks, intersecting at various angles and directions.
I’m trying to give more attention to the small, intimate details in the forest.
Occasionally, I find stumps that indicate a tree has been purposely cut down. I do not know why, but I suspect they were felled by hunters to make their hunting blinds, which I have seen scattered around the forest.
More later,
Ken
