Category: Fall

I stopped by a local park yesterday to see what was left of Fall color.  Not much, to be honest.  There were some splashes of red & yellow, but also trees that had completely lost their leaves already.  Still I found plenty to photograph and I’ll post a few images over the next couple of days.  In one area of the park, the ground was completely covered with pine needles.  These always make a nice simple composition.  This image was shot with the Lensbaby Composer and soft focus optic.  Processing was done in Photoshop and Topaz Adjust.

The Fall color in my area this year has not been consistent.  It seemed vibrant several weeks ago, then became very drab, spruced up for a couple days with bright reds and yellows, and now seems to be headed straight to brown.  I’ve not had much interest in going out to photograph the colors, but I did snap these 2 images recently at the Lake.  The leaves had gathered near the beach in the shallow water and there was quite a variety of shapes and colors.  I think these images would make fun {and difficult!}  jigsaw puzzles!  Both were processed with Topaz and the one below followed up with a painted effect.

My recent hard drive crash and subsequent retrieval of files has made me realize just HOW many images I keep.  Practically all of them.  I know, I know….that’s probably not the best idea because it takes up a ton of hard drive space.  Add to that the fact that I bracket a lot for HDR, which triples [or more!] the number of shots.  BUT, it’s fun to go back through old files to see what I can find and work with later.   Like this scene from last October.  Now that I’ve given it a second look and worked on it a bit, I think it’s a keeper.  P.S.  Let me know if you find any good sales on external hard drives!  🙂

I tend not to crop my images very often as I prefer to compose the scene as best I can in camera.  This image is an exception and I felt that cropping brought the focus to what I really liked about the scene –  the flower pots on the brick steps.  What I cropped out of the top of the image is the rest of the door.  The door had a wreath hanging on it that caused me to struggle to determine the focus … was it the wreath or the flower pots?   Once I cropped away the distraction, I was much happier with the shot.  I processed this one with a little Topaz Simplify.