Colorado landscapes: Aspen (no, not the city... ;-) )

 

Hey, I’m back. A busy travel schedule during the last couple weeks kept me away from any photography work. I still like to show you a few more photos from our trip to Colorado in September.

We were a little early for the peak of the autumn colors, the aspens just started turning yellow. But we kept our eyes open for locations with some color and good texture in the timber. As soon the light touches a scene like this you have your shot, a photo that tells the story of the changing season in the Rocky Mountains.

Another interesting subject for a nature photographer can be the tall and mostly straight stems of the aspens. Their light color in combination with a subtle light and a dark background always appealed to me. I like the graphic impact of the staggered arrangement and the rich texture of the bark and grass in the foreground.

While making the photo I already had a black and white image in mind. As always when it comes to black and white, the post processing was done with NIK Silver Efex Pro.

Fall colors 2013 - last call

 

Last weekend was probably the last chance to make some images that tell the story about fall and its colors here in Eastern Iowa. Despite some night frost many Sugar Maples had still a few leaves left but they came down quickly as the wind blew quite a bit this weekend.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, I try to isolate the leaves from the background to make the colors pop and draw the eye right to the subject. Exposure compensation by about one stop helps to suppress elements in the picture that would otherwise just take the attention away. There is no reason that every crack in the rocks or rotten leave on the ground needs to have detail. Yes, I know, high dynamic range is ubiquitous but I believe this type of image just needs the opposite. Even if you just use Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW, leave the shadow slider in it’s parking position or maybe even darken the shadows. Here I applied in addition a dark vignette in Adobe Lightroom to keep the eye away from the edges of the photo.

Taking time and looking around while wandering along the edge of the timber leads to more interesting subjects that can be photographed only in fall in their particular state. This Common Milkweed had opened and exposed its many overlapping seeds, each with a tuft of silky hairs. I hope you enjoy.

Fall colors 2013

 

I like to interrupt my stories about Maine for the results of some actual photography. We are able to postpone all kind of events but we can't keep the progress of the season on hold. It was obviously that here in Eastern Iowa the fall colors are at their peak. We don't know if there will be any leaf left next weekend but I still hope so. If we "camera owners" wanted to catch the essence of the season we had to go out and shoot this weekend, no matter how bad the weather was. It was actually not too bad, a little too much gray in the sky, but the colors of autumn have definitely been there. Because there are too many trees that are bare already, the key for success was to extract the colors optically from the surrounding area and the background.

I went to the White Pine Hollow State Preserve, a nature area only a few miles west from our home, to give it a try. This is as good as a National Park. You have to walk in, there is no road going through, and I haven't met a single soul all afternoon there. If you walk down the path from the parking lot on the East side, you end up in a canyon that has been carved by a river. It is wild, there is a lot of dead wood, but if you open your eyes you may find the colors of fall in front of a good background.

While checking out a ravine that leads to the bottom of the canyon, I found this wonderful looking mushroom growing on a tree. I removed a few dead leaves for this shot and mounted the best lens for detail shots in my bag, the Carl Zeiss Distagon T*, 35mm / f2 ZF, to the Nikon D300s. It is a lens with manual focus but I love its color rendition and unbeatable sharpness.

It is easy to look just for the big color contrast in the fall between a real blue sky and the reds, oranges, and yellows of the leaves, but if there is no blue sky we need to work with the elements that are available. I hope you enjoy...

You know it is fall, if ...

 

You know it is fall, if you pull in your driveway after a long return trip from Maine and the road is completely covered with leaves. I skip to show you a picture about this mess (I didn't even make one ;-)  ). You know it is fall after you wake up the next morning and the bird bath is covered with a thin ice crystal that looks like a Christmas ornament, a safe sign for the first night frost. And you know it is fall when at the same time the early morning sun back-lights the leaves of the grapevine on the balcony.

I love the quality of light that autumn brings us and I thought I share this with you before I may post a few more images from our travels to the coast of Maine. I hope you enjoy...