This
time of year I turn almost exclusively to
landscape photography. What I love about early fall is that even the
most common of scenes can become extraordinary when the leaves
start
turning and the light is right. I feel the same way when snow drapes
the landscape, I love to explore and find new compositions. Fall is
really exciting because there is so much change going on. Not just the
different feeling to the air and the birds that make me wish I was
traveling with them, but also the very scenes themselves are changing
each day...
This first Image I made last Wednesday, the second image was made
Yesterday, a week later...
Here is a project that I would love to do... imagine going to the same
location once a week for an entire year and taking a panoramic photo
each week. If you showed each of the photos on a screen and slowly
merged from one image to the next it would gradually play like a movie
that showed that location and how it changed through the entire year.
Now imagine that instead of showing each image separately you
created
an entirely new image, made up of pieces of each of the images,
carefully merged together, so as you start from left and move your eyes
across to the right you would see the scene go through the end of
winter, then spring, then summer, then fall, then the next winter.
Usually an image captures a moment in time, but this kind of image
could chronicle an entire year, in a single image. I would
love to do
that for an entire selection of beautiful locations.
This is another panorama that I made yesterday from a different view of
the same pond. I've shrunk these panoramas down to be able to email
them, but if I printed this one at normal resolution it would be over 5
feet wide...
One last image from this week.
I really enjoy using backlighting in the fall, it saturates the leaf
colors so well, and it's almost like the leaves glow with a light of
their own, but it also is really tough to do well, getting exposures
right is
a challenge, you often get lens flare, and you can see I had to blow
out the sky in the upper right (let it go to white) so I could get the
rest of the scene exposed correctly... but I still like it :-) .
It has been a very odd week, we have had near record highs for three of
the days of the week. Yet tomorrow I head up the the Yellow Dog Plains
north of Marquette to do some work photographing a threatened location,
and I've been told to expect snow! If I find any snow I will leave it
up in the UP.
Have a great weekend, enjoy the most beautiful, fleeting part of the
year!
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