Yeah, I know that to most of you what live in true 4-season climates, fall color may be no huge deal. But here in the 2.x season US deep south it’s a kinda big deal when it really happens. After a hot and dry summer, I didn’t expect anything and in fact it took a while to kick off. But even though we’re now well past peak (many trees are almost or totally bare) there was a late-season bump in color a few weeks ago. I’ve been out trying to capture some of it before looming weather knocks all the remaining leaves off and we head into damp grey winter.
These were taken around the Kisatchie Bayou Campground and nearby Kisatchie Hills Wilderness Area in central Louisiana. As a result they’re quasi-woodland photos. I like a good woodland photo, but here our woods are usually densely undergrown with weeds, briars / brambles, bushes, etc. that make moving about like trying to walk inside a huge cotton ball. As a result, photo compositions are often non-existent. I get frustrated with woodland photography because I find myself using non-woodland composition “rules”, which is obviously a recipe for failure. So this time, I forced myself to “accept” some composition as valid, even though I thought they were marginal at best.
You’ll notice that despite what I said about our woods being undergrown, these are not. That’s because they’re not woodlands, per se. Those photos were taken at a maintained campground, which has been cleared.
Anyway, 'nuff said, here are the shots. Sorry for the number, but I couldn’t pick between them…
I’m usually deep DOF kind of guy, but I intentionally shot this at f/4 to try and enforce some separation. Does it work? I’m not sure, probably less than 50/50. I don’t like the way the bare limb sits in front of the leaves at the top but I couldn’t do anything about it.
I spent 15 minutes standing on a trail waiting for the sunlight to shine on these leaves once again… just like it did 15 seconds before I got my camera set up. It never really did again.
not working for me, its too half-hearted. At this focus range you probably need to be closer to f/1.4 to really melt the background. No clear subject in the composition either, so probably would have better suited a deep DOF approach.
just as a convenient example, this is more the situation I would be thinking about isolating the subject using depth of field.
0673 us my favourite, beautiful scene. Photography is always about the light.
Awesome shots, my favorite is the the one with the flowing water and the little sappling that’s also holding for its dear leaves, which are already on their way out.
First thing that came to mind reading your first sentence:
Yeah, I have an f/1.7 manual nifty fifty but that was the wrong focal length for that shot. On several of those shots I’ve done some selective (and hopefully sufficiently subtle) “light path” brightening to guide the eye but it didn’t help here.
I like 0646 and 0678 best, but the whole set is a great little insight into your autumn landscape.
Here in my part of Australia, the native flora doesn’t really ‘do’ autumn. Things just get colder… but we do have a lot of planted trees from the Northern hemisphere, some naturalized too, so autumn colour is actually present. Not in the national parks though!
Nice gallery, the body of work here gives a good sense of the place and the feeling of that particular day : sunny, calm and from img n°0646 I guess not windy at all so probably even kind of warm.
I really like the 0638 0646 and after most of this post. On the last one some colors feels funny like color tab of contrast eq pushed a little hard ?
I’m not bothered by the use of shallow DOF you made and even more I’d add that in woodland areas leaves, trunks, branch really add a lot of details and edges in the image that kind overwhelm me and the use of shallow DOF can, IMO mitigate that.
I like the water shot, but of course I wish it was bigger, badder, more impressive! LOL It’s a four inch “waterfall”!
This year has been more colorful than most I recall, albeit a little later. From what I understand, Louisiana had massive old-growth hardwood forests a few hundred years ago, but they were cut. Virtually all the replanting that’s happened since has been softwood, particularly longleaf pine, since they’re basically a cash crop. So what color that remains is either a remnant of earlier times or imported varieties. Usually, autumn is better called “fall”, i.e., the leaves just turn brown and fall off. Pine forests are dark, dull green and rust-brown (from dead pine needles). Kinda drab places.
Winters are usually dead, grey and often wet (i.e., kinda ugly). We get a light snowfall (at most 3-4 inches / 7-9cm) maybe once every three to five winters.* Sleet, freezing rain and even ice are a bit more common but not as ‘deep’. However we do get ice storms not infrequently, on a seasonal basis at least. Trees, power lines, etc., will get covered in layers of ice. But also, we’ll have “winter” days in the 70sF, so …
Thanks.
* And when it snows, everything comes to a grinding halt, naturally. People will instantly complain about the lack of snow-abatement responses, but I completely understand. I wouldn’t want to be a local official trying to promote spending massive dollars on something that happens in frequently and on a small scale. The biggest problem are the local yahoos who either freak out because of the snow, or totally ignore it and get into trouble on icy roads.
Thanks! Yeah it warmed up about to 60F but it was just at freezing when I first set out.
These were done in ART, so no contrast equalizer in the version I used. However with the new one (1.21) there’s this, among several others:
However, I did boost mid / highs and dropped shadows a little bit. That’s a typical thing I do to provide a bit more definition. To my eyes it also provides a little “room” for brighter / more saturated mid tones to exist and helps keep them from being too overwhelming. Maybe it could be dropped back a little though.
Yep. That’s what I was thinking, but the combination of distance, aperture and focal length didn’t yield enough bokeh to achieve that, IMO. That lens is f/4. There’s also an f/2.8 version, but even used it’s 3-4x the price of the f/4 variety.
This year at our house, we had a hard freeze toward the end of “fall”, as in falling leaves. That just puts the whole tree into some sort of stasis; the leaves that haven’t fallen just turn brown and hang on the tree until a wind strong enough to strip them off comes around.
For all the tangle, any collection of trees makes for some interesting light, even at high noon. And with that variegated light comes interesting compositions. Just gotta look for it…
It’s a four inch “waterfall”!