Checking my wildflower garden for dew-kissed flowers I instead found this little web, and the owner was nearby.
Canon 5D Mark II, EF100mm f/2.8 Macro. ISO 400. Various exposures around 1/100 and f/4.
Lightroom processing: Raising the black point was the key to making the drops stand out. Clarity (mid-tone contrast) does the rest. So for all of these images I set the black point over 30, clarity over 40, but everything else pretty standard (i.e., bit of vibrance, exposure tweaking, etc.)
I had to get out of the house and do a little bit of photography. I have a tiny project for our local state representative that I’ve had on the books for a while, waiting for the scenery to perk up. So I headed out to Stow and did some shooting. I ended up at Lake Boon and what unfolded over the next hour had “end of summer” written all over it. It was a warm autumn evening and folks were still enjoying the lake as the sun creeped slowly to the horizon.
One of the great benefits of the new breed of DSLRs is the ability to shoot video and I took the opportunity to capture some of the quiet scenes that came by that evening. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. (Click the HD button for better quality if you’ve got fast internets.)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es1YUOFg1V8[/youtube]
Autumn officially arrived here in the northern hemisphere at 5:19 this morning. I probably should have been outside to welcome it, but… well… sigh… no excuses.
The first signs of fall have been popping up around the New England landscape for a few weeks now and a few harbingers that are here in Massachusetts became visible in the past week or so.
I like autumn for two reasons: color and revelation. The intensity of colors of the season vary from year to year and I honestly don’t care if this is going to be a “good year” or not – if I’m alive to photograph them, it is, by definition, a good year. There’s still something special about making a turn down a path or stream and having a bank of red trees glowing in the afternoon sun.
By “revelation” I mean that the changes in the autumn open new sights that have been closed to us by the dense foliage of the fall. Places that were hidden become visible. Landscapes that were boring become dramatic.
Some people dislike fall because it signals the end of the warm weather and the promise of being miserably cold in a few months. Fair enough. But, for me, the cool mornings beckon me to get out and explore before the ice arrives.
If you have the urge to take great autumn pictures and you have a DSLR type camera, think about purchasing a polarizing filter for your favorite lens. While this reduces the amount of light entering the camera (the filter is very similar to that of sunglasses), the filter removes some of the glare off the leaf surface – intensifying the colors that are there. If you don’t own a fancy camera that allows you to add filters, consider shooting your fall landscape on cloudy days or just after it rains. This provides the best conditions for the colors to pop out.
Here’s hoping we have a picture-perfect fall.
