After The Fall
I brought a friend along for a photo walk in Highland Creek this past Saturday. It has been roughly been two weeks since the cottage closed up and I needed to get out among the trees. So did my friend.
The weather was decent, the sun was shining and, because most of the leaves were on the ground and bereft of any vibrancy, I thought the outing would make for a good study in monochromatic scenes. I was not wrong. Although I still managed to create some good color images, the black and white conversion of others (heck even the monochromatic color shots) really made the scenes pop. light, dark, texture, pattern...it was all there.
Thanks to the shorter days - and the loss of daylight savings time - the sun was much lower in the sky at 2pm than I was used to. This was an advantage and a challenge. There were certain areas in our photo walk that need the sun to be in a different spot, like the small pond I have photographed before. Yesterday, those viewpoints were obliterated by a a combination of the sun and its mirror reflection on the water. There was no really way to capture those angles without extreme flaring.
I couldn’t resist pulling out my ND250 filter for some motion blur shots, as well. One real advantage of the EVF on my Olympus EM5 Mark III is that even with a nearly opaque ND filter on my lens, I can still easily see to compose my shots. Not so easy with the optical viewfinder on my much loved Nikon D750.
No, it’s not your eyes. I thought these two images looked better with the reflection on top.
All in all, we were at Highland Creek, wandering the less-beaten path for about 2 hours. Fresh air and a little exercise - both physically and mentally - was thoroughly enjoyable. We walked far enough that we went well past my usual stopping point and had some excellent opportunities to catch open shade images as well as sunlit compositions And even though I try to minimize the human element in most of my work, there was some pretty stunning graffiti on one of the concrete overpass supports that I could not ignore.
I hope you enjoyed this little trip. I’ve Been to this park a few times over the year, especially during the early days of the pandemic lockdown. It was nice to visit it again and chances are good I’ll be back a few more times over the coming months.
