A WALK IN THE WOODS

This week marked the peak of fall color in our area, though the colors haven't seemed as bright as they have in past years.  We have a 5-acre stand of woods in our subdivision, and, as I did last year, I took a walk through the woods with my camera.

I am generally poor at trying to capture more panoramic views of fall color--they always come across as trite.  So I spent my time either looking down or looking up to shoot smaller compositions.

First, looking down at fallen leaves, I was searching for leaves that could serve as focal points for the shots.

I confess to "staging" shots from time to time, but this last shot, which includes the leaves of a maple seedling, was not staged.

Looking up, I focused on leaf-bearing branches that showed diverse color.  My goal here was to keep the leaves in the foreground in focus and allow the more distant foliage to go out of focus.  To do this I generally used a wide-open aperture and tried to find branches whose leaves were more or less in the same plane.  These first couple of shots were just OK.

The following shot was unusual in that I was focusing on just a couple of leaves and wanted to show the tree but keep it out of focus.  A little weird.

One of the problems with the above shots was that there seemed to be too much empty sky that was predominantly white because of a high overcast.  The shot below had more foliage behind the subject leaves, but I found it a bit confusing because there was not enough difference in color between the foreground and background foliage.

The image below seems more successful because the subject leaves do not get lost against a similar-hued background.

The best shot of this group, I thought, was the following, which shows more diversity of color.

John