Wednesday, October 12, 2022
So, the question was asked, “What is your favorite season for photography?” This was the one question I was really not prepared for on this morning mentoring session. It did come at a very ironic time though. There we were at Thunder Hill on the Blue Ridge Parkway during what would have to be considered peak leaf time. John and I had been trying to get a morning out there for probably a month now for a couple of mentoring hours looking at compositions in the landscape. Not wanting to waste the time with bad lighting, and less than favorable conditions, I tried to get a day picked out which had some clouds and a good chance for color to appear. Those days were few and far between, so when I saw that there were going to be good clouds for Wednesday morning, I checked with him to see if he was free. He had some time in the morning, and we locked it in for 6:45am.
At some point towards the end of the session, John posed that question to me. It sent my brain into a frenzy if I’m being honest. Even a few months ago, I would have said Fall without a hesitation. However, since around mid-September, I have been asking myself that same question because I could tell that I wasn’t getting all that amped up about the changing leaves. I had been thinking about previous years when the Fall season put me in a serious funk that sometimes took until December to pull out of. I remembered all of the stress of trying to get to the right elevations during the correct weeks so that I could see the colors, all while paying attention to the weather to make sure that I had light that I liked working with. It had been my regular routine for much of the last 17 years during the month of October. The end results were rarely all that great and usually I only ended up with a handful of images that I really liked.
These thoughts have been rattling around in my head for the last six weeks at least and they have helped me come to a conclusion of sorts. It is rare that I actually get excited about the Fall colors. I just go and hunt them because that is what I’m supposed to do as a photographer. This realization got me thinking about my quest for Fall Colors and landscape photography in general. Where my thoughts ended up kind of surprised me. Not only was I not all that excited about the colors of the season, but landscape photography also didn’t hold that same spark that it once did. When I started photography, I was all about the natural landscape, and wanted nothing man made in the frame. Over the years, I have gradually let the hand of man creep into my photographs until I accepted the fact that I was a decay photographer. That pendulum has continued to swing, and I have found that I have more fun doing the decay and rural photography than I have doing landscapes. That puts everything on its ear when it comes to what season I prefer to shoot in.
As we were walking along the side of the Blue Ridge Parkway, watching drivers with road rage honking and passing cars that were slowing to turn into the overlooks, and had seen numerous folks out enjoying the seasonal colors with cellphone cameras, and actual dedicated cameras, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t the landscape that I was falling out of favor with, it was the fact that everyone flocks to the same places to take the same photos, at the same time. There is just so little left to be new in landscape photography anymore, and I’ve wanted my photography to blend in with the crowd. Therefore, I’m starting to shy away from what everyone else is doing and working on my own little niche’ of photography with the decay subjects. That is where I have a very unique voice and I feel that I have something to say. With that in mind, I answered the question with Winter. Winter was my favorite time to photograph things, possibly because that is the season when most folks hang their camera bags up. I know that I have very little company when I go out in the Winter, and I really enjoy that part of the experience.
I know the question that is in your mind right now. Why am I out on the Blue Ridge Parkway during peak week engaging in photography with the masses? Well, it actually had nothing to do with the color, and everything to do with the clouds. I needed to get John out working on compositions and I needed nice and soft light for him to have a chance of working many different angles while not having to worry too much about the light. It was funny that I was so excited about the weather finally giving us some clouds to work with and another photographer that we ran into was deeply upset that the sky wasn’t clear. I even overheard a couple talking about the fact that they had read that it was going to be sunny and clear today. Everyone was unhappy with the conditions but me, and John was quickly learning the value of soft light on the landscape.
We spent a solid three hours working different scenes around Thunder Hill as we watched others stop by for a few minutes and snap a few photos and move on. Most of them tended to stay at the main overlook which John and I both agreed wasn’t all that photogenic. That was the lesson for the day in my opinion. I wanted to get him looking around to find the compositions that most would miss. Hey, if I was going to concentrate on landscape photography, I might as well try to make it a little different from the norm.
I couldn’t help but think as I was helping fine tune some compositions that I should be all kinds of excited about the colors because they were pretty much at peak for this altitude. The truth was, I was not really all that worked up about the colors, but I was having a lot of fun seeing the landscape through John’s eyes. He had some really good ideas and concepts which we worked through to make them even better. There was one composition that he came up with that I hadn’t really considered before, even though I had shot the main element many times before. As I worked through the composition with him and explained why things worked, I considered building on the idea for my own photograph. There really wasn’t time though as I was very focused on working with him. I just filed the idea away for another time.
As we were wrapping up with the morning’s mentoring, I decided that while I was out there, I might as well get a few photographs of the Fall color. It really was that kind of deadpan remark I made to myself. Of course, I had my camera with me and figured that since I had lugged it around for the last few hours, I might as well try some things out. The sky wasn’t really doing me any favors as the clouds were all very low. There was a bit of detail to be had, but not much. I started to look around for ideas for things to shoot that would work with the conditions. Isolations was going to be what was going to work out at this point, so I started to look for subjects that weren’t sky related, but still took advantage of the Fall color. When in Rome….and all that.
I was now one of the button pressing masses that had converged on the Blue Ridge Parkway. There were easily as many people as I would see on a busy Saturday milling around the overlook. It was strange blending in like I was doing after spending most of my photography tenure attracting a lot of attention because I stood out from the crowd. There were probably another half dozen of me at various points along the Parkway. Would the real Slim Shady please stand up…please stand up? Regardless, I was here and my mind was fully in the mode of being a landscape photographer after coaching for the last three hours. It was time to get to work.
I figured that the light really hadn’t changed since John had worked that section of the fence that we had teamed up on earlier. I went back there and felt very odd using my telephoto lens at a place where I have routinely used a super wide-angle lens. It was the right choice for the composition I had in mind. It took me a little while to find the right angles for the composition and I had to really talk myself through it. I finally did land on the right composition and worked out the depth of field that I needed. OK, so my main subject is a pair of fence posts made out of very aged wood. I guess you could say that this is landscape photography with a decay slant to it. Whatever you want to call it, I actually liked how it turned out. It was an oddity for me because it is not something that I would have typically seen. Thankfully John sees things differently than I do and opened my eyes to the possibilities with this subject. Even Toni liked how it turned out.
Before you start to say that I have gone and stolen an idea from another photographer, that isn’t really the case at all. The composition that John ended up with started with questions that I asked, and then ended up with tweaks to the idea which I had a fair amount of input. In the end, his idea was a solid concept which we both worked on. This version is my take on the concept and done with my style. If anything, it should show that a composition that John came up with was very much worth shooting, and I want him to know that.
With a bit over three hours passed since I got to Thunder Hill, I finally had my first shot in the bag. The fact that I was now working the third camera in four days was not lost on me. Just this past Sunday, I had run through nearly 1000 exposures on the R5 doing a portrait shoot. The first three hours of the morning were spent working with a Canon T7i, and now I was back to my regular rig. Each of these cameras have different control placement and different ways of accessing features. To say that I was a little discombobulated would be an understatement, but it was good to be back to my old school DSLR body.
I started to walk down the hill to my favorite valley knowing that there was some good color to be had there. When I got down to the area that I wanted to shoot in, I tried to pick out a point of interest. This was where I really dislike fall photography. It seems that the majority of the photos that I see posted online are just broad captures of color without anchors, or even a visual path. The variety of colors adds to the confusion of the scene, and there is usually no consideration given to composition or light. Fall colors don’t make a good photograph. A good photograph works regardless of the colors, they should just add to the scene. That was what I was looking for. I needed a story to tell, and I needed something that would make sense with the colors.
As I was scanning the landscape, I found a dead tree that was nestled in a large grouping of colorful trees. I found a composition that would work which allowed me to utilize the colors in the scene. I realized that once again, my landscape photo was going to be based around a decay subject. Apparently, you just can’t take the photographer away from the decay, but you can’t take the decay away from the photographer. I actually loved the story that I saw here with the vivid and colorful trees surrounding the bare tree with no life left in it. The irony here was that the trees with the brightest colors were going to soon join the bare tree and there would be no difference at all between them. There is that wabi-sabi approach of mine coming into play. There is beauty in the decline.
Trying to find the right placement of the elements took a little more time than I would care to admit, but I wanted to be sure that I got the composition right since I was shooting at around 130mm. At that focal length, and the range that I was working at, I wasn’t going to have enough fine detail to do much cropping if I wanted to keep it nice and crisp. I just thought through the compositions and found a few that I felt worked very well. You actually see two of them posted in this blog. The main subject is the same, I just changed the position within the frame. I liked them both and decided that they would make an excellent pair of prints that could be placed together in a room.
By this point, I was feeling like I was in the zone finally. Since I was at my favorite valley, I decided to fit my wide-angle lens and frame up a composition similar to what I had shot before. The colors were better this time than any time before and I hoped that they would carry the photograph despite the lack of an interesting sky. Well, that didn’t work out as planned and none of those images made it through the final culling because the sky just really let the images down. I had better skies in other attempts which held more value for me than the color of the trees did.
I did want to take advantage of the color though, so I found another tree that stood out from the crowd. It was this bright golden hue that dominated the edge of the valley. I tried to figure out a way to photograph it but ended up including the sky in every composition I could think of. Just as I was about to give up on it, I started to pay attention to the trunk of the tree. It was just able to be seen at point within the main body of the tree. There wasn’t much visible, but it was identifiable, and the dark bark contrasted nicely with the bright leaves. I decided to do a slight adjustment to a composition that I have done before where I pick out the structure of the tree and use the leaves as a background. This time, I filled the frame with the leaves leaving just a small opening to catch a glimpse of the trunk. This is one of those exercises that I have used in mentoring before, where I talk about figure/ground relationships. I chose to make the leaves negative space which just consisted of color and make the trunk the main character in the frame. To give the trunk more meaning and a sense of scale, I included a bunch of the leaves leaving a very small section of the frame to be occupied by the tree trunk. I wasn’t sure if it would work or not, but when I saw it on the monitor, I was quite happy with it.
I realized something from this photograph. I liked having a more simplistic view of the Fall colors. The gaggle of different colors in a scene is just too complicated for me. I like having the colors have room to breathe, or to have one color throughout the scene. It goes along with my desire to create simplified compositions without a lot of extraneous clutter. These are the Fall images that I enjoy seeing, and I was actually starting to enjoy myself at this point.
Realizing that I wasn’t going to get anything at the valley when it came to a grand landscape, I crossed the street and looked at the other side. I had worked with John on a couple of compositions that I had shot previously over there and had found that the soft sky was actually working pretty well with the scene. What I liked about it was the fact that the distant hills were very cool in color tone, while the foreground ridge had a wonderful warm hue. the lower mountains were still largely green in color for a bit more contrast to the scene. I had already worked out the elements that I would want in the composition when I was working through the scene with John. A quick swap of the lens and I was making exposures. This wasn’t a fantastic scene, but it checked enough of the boxes to where I felt that it deserved to be included in this series of images if for no other reason than to help tell the story of the morning.
I worked a few other variations of the composition, but none of them worked with the sky that was present. I started going back and forth across the street, dodging many vehicles that were filling the Parkway. There was just nothing else to shoot here, and I had been at the same location for four and a half hours at this point. I was getting tired of Thunder Hill even though it is one of my favorite places to work from. I wanted to see if there were other areas with good color that I could find compositions at, and it was looking like things were getting pretty crowded as the day went on.
When I got back to the parking area, I stopped behind the truck and took one last look. I remembered having a rather funny conversation with John over four hours before about including the roadway in the composition. He had said that he didn’t care for the road when we were building a composition from on top of the embankment to the left. I told him that he would be changing his mind when I showed him a composition I had in mind. Sure enough, by the end of that section of the morning, he was sold on including the road as a part of the composition.
As I looked at the road, I saw a little hint of detail in the sky, and good color to the left of the road. I didn’t feel like redoing my same composition that I always shoot from here, and I remembered that there was another good one to be had from the parking lot side. I hadn’t mentioned that to John, so I figured that I would shoot it to show him another way to use the road as a leading line. I moved to the edge of the parking area and started to frame up the scene. The bare trees to the right caught my eye as something that I hadn’t included before. They gave a nice balance to the scene and helped justify the sky that I was including.
Since this was a new composition for me, I had to figure it out as I went. There were small movements of the camera as I got things dialed in within the composition. I added a grad filter to keep the detail in the sky and got ready to make an exposure. Of course, there were several cars on the road at this point and I had to wait for them to clear out. Just as the last car would get close to the edge of the frame, two others would enter from the other side. I played this game for several minutes until I got a clear road so that I could capture a photograph.
As luck would have it though, I saw a few little problems with the composition once the photos were made. I made some minor framing adjustments and started to make another exposure, but this time, there was a full line of cars in both directions moving slowly. Every time it looked like the road would clear there would be a new batch of cars driving through. When I finally got five seconds of empty road, I cranked off three exposures with the hopes of catching the trees still in the morning breeze. This was the most frustrating composition that I shot the entire morning because of the traffic. It just reminded me how much I hated being on the Parkway during leaf season.
I was done here, and I went to pack things up in the truck. I had planned on going to a few more locations, but after seeing all that traffic, I didn’t want to bother with it. I just headed North and was ready to head out to Traphill to check out a barn that I had recently decided I wanted to shoot it with Fall colors to make an otherwise lackluster scene pop a little bit. I wasn’t sure if the leaves would be at peak yet, but I figured that I could at least get an idea of when I could shoot it and maybe see if the composition would work. Oh yeah, did I mention that Traphill on a Wednesday afternoon would be almost a ghost town compared to the Blue Ridge Parkway? I was looking forward to doing some rural decay photography because as I mentioned, that is where my heart is these days.
I got headed down the road and talked to Toni to see how her day was going. I made a slight detour to check another barn near Aho Gap that I have been wanting to shoot. That one didn’t look all that great, so I just kept on going and talking to her. Things were getting better with school after talking with one of the administrators about some issues. I was glad to hear that because she was doing way too good to be having the issues that she was having. It was seeming like the problems were going to get sorted out, and she had a much better grasp on how to do one of her assignments over the break.
When I made it back onto the Parkway at Bamboo Gap, I passed by a brilliantly colored tree on the side of the road. It was just standing out from the crowd and begging for attention. Well, I did have my camera and there were no other people around, so I was happy to give it some attention. I got turned around and pulled off on the side of the road. I grabbed my camera with the telephoto lens on it and mounted a polarizer. I started making some images of the tree and realized that the rain was starting. I used my hat to shield the front of the lens to keep it clear from water spots. The rain got heavier, but I wasn’t happy with the photographs I was taking. I had to move the camera under the hatch of the 4Runner because it was coming down too fast to be able to keep the filter dry. I took it off and wiped it down. Since the rain wasn’t letting up, I decided to pull off the adapter ring for the Lee 100 filter holder and I mounted my lens hood to shield the front element. This meant that I couldn’t use the polarizer because my small 82mm wouldn’t fit the 77mm lens without a step-up ring which would make the lens hood unusable. In this situation I chose to forego the subtle effect of the polarizer in exchange for being able to make photographs in the rain.
Having been at the far end of the zoom range and still not getting the shot that I wanted, I decided to add the 2X extender while the camera was under the cover of the hatch. This would give me a 400mm reach and that would be plenty to do what I needed. With the camera reconfigured, I moved back into location and started to find the new composition. I got in really tight to the trunk and used the leaves as a background of sorts. There were two shades of yellow to the tree which added to the dimension of it all and I really started to like the composition that I had at 285mm. I played around with the depth of field and also shot several frames with falling leaves hoping to get a little action in the shot. In the end, none of the falling leaves worked out for the image and I ended up using this one which was the cleanest of them all.
Since I had the ‘reach out and touch somebody’ lens, I started to look for more compositions in the area. The only other part that caught my eye was a fence on the other side of the street. At the end of it, there was a nice orange tree next to a deep green tree. I liked the contrast, and I really liked the fence. The lens combination worked very well for this scene at 260mm. the compression made the fence stand out which was what I wanted. I wished I had been able to use the polarizer, but the rain was falling too hard at this point to even try it. With the deep lens hood on, I could have stayed out there indefinitely with the camera. I could have, but I didn’t. This was the last scene that I wanted to shoot. I went back to the truck and started to break down the camera and get it all put away.
I had to do some drying of the gear because the whole thing was dripping wet. I left the bag open to hopefully let things dry out while I was driving. There was nothing else that I saw on the Parkway that caught my eye. The rain was a bit too much for me to get out anyway, so I was happy to get back on US 421 towards home. I did stop by a barn that I had photographed recently to see what it looked like in the Fall colors. I didn’t even turn down the road to check it out because I could see all the tractors and cars parked next to it which would ruin any chance for a composition. It looked like I was going to be heading down the mountain for real this time. My next destination was to check out a tree at Toni’s school that she thought I might want to photograph. I was then going to head out to Traphill to scope out that barn that I have been wanting to shoot for a while.
After a little bit of driving, I pulled onto the road where the school was and looked for the tree. I was able to find it easy enough but didn’t see a composition that I liked. The sky was no longer interesting, and the rain was falling pretty hard at this point. I just filed it away for another day and continued North bound for Traphill. That was another stretch of a drive as I went to the other side of the county to get to this barn.
When I arrived, the rain was pretty much done which was a good thing. I started to look for the composition that I had in mind for the barn and couldn’t find what I had planned. Something was different, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have a clear view of the barn because of the fence along the roadway that was covered in vegetation. The distant hill was full of color, though not quite at peak just yet. There were a lot of things going against me for this photograph, but I figured that I might as well try it out since I was here. The way that the weather has been going, the next time I might have clouds could very well be after all the leaves are gone. I would rather get a less than ideal image than miss it all together.
I got the truck parked and grabbed the camera. I started out with the 24-70mm lens because I knew that I was going to be including the road. I tried to find the best place to put the camera, but everywhere I went the composition didn’t feel right. I was trying to eliminate the sky because it was pretty featureless at this point. I had planned on including the road which I was doing, but the road became too much of an element and it ended up dominating the scene. At 70mm, I was including too much so I decided to go for the longer lens.
Once I fit that, I was able to get the barn completely isolated and didn’t have to include the road or the sky. The problem was the composition was very stagnant and uninteresting. I needed to have more thought in the composition, so I repositioned once again making sure that the vegetation lined up as thoughtfully as I could at the bottom of the barn. I opened the lens up and decided to include the road once again. This still felt very off balance to me, and I needed something in the upper left to make the image work. I opened it up even more and got a corner of sky that matched the roadway. This worked for me, and I liked the balance, not to mention the diagonal elements that they added.
The problem was the sky was just not all that interesting. there was a bit of detail in it, but not much at all. To take advantage of what I had there, I went back to the truck and grabbed a 3-stop hard edge grad filter which I placed right at the tree line. That got the exposure looking good and I was able to make some photographs that I was pretty happy with. It was again waiting for a lull in the breeze to make the exposures hoping that at least one of them would have good cloud detail as well as perfectly still vegetation. In addition to that concern, I also selected different focus points to make sure that I had sufficient depth of field which was a concern at this focal length and the distance from my foreground to background.
Everything came together for this photo though, and it was the one that I was most excited about. It was the first image that I processed as well. I’m not sure if the conditions are going to get better for this barn, but I’m really happy with how this one turned out. It wasn’t as easy a shot as I had hoped it would be, but what I ended up with was better than I had expected. You just can’t go wrong with that!
When I was done with the barn photos, I had 124 frames captured which was a bunch considering I started the day as a mentoring session. It was nice to be only looking at that many images to cull through after more than 900 from a four-hour day. I was expecting to only have about five images to process, but I’m happy to say that there was a total of nine images that made it into the keeper’s stack. It turned into a very good day, and I am thrilled with the Fall Foliage photos. These are some of my favorite ones from this season. I’m still leaning towards the decay side of my photography more than the landscapes, but it was a good experience to shoot the Autumn colors with a little different attitude about them. There was no pressure, and I didn’t feel like I had to get the photos. That is something that I just can’t say about other years. I can be the world’s worst about putting pressure on myself that nobody else even sees as a concern. I don’t know if I’ll be back out this fall to get the colors again, but if I don’t, I think I have a collection that is better than what I got last year…and that is from just a single trek!
As always, if you see an image here that speaks to you, I would love to talk with you about getting matched up with a print. If you have problems with the website, or want to discuss larger prints, or different media, just give me a call or email. I’m happy to work with you directly for your purchase. There truly is no better way to enjoy a photograph than to be able to hold it in your hand and mount it on the wall.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek as well as the photos.
Until next time….
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