Fall interlude
In the past couple of days I’ve taken some time to drive around New England photographing the fall.
I had thought this would be a less colorful fall than usual because of the dry weather we’ve had. But when it got going there was a sudden intense burst, and the sunny days made me want to take off in my car with my camera—which is mostly my android phone, plus a little point-and-shoot.
On Thursday I went up to the far north, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Yesterday I stayed close to home. I got some good photos considering that my camera doesn’t have the ability to faithfully represent the detail of what I see with my eyes, especially the mountains with their distant vistas.
To paraphrase the Sound of Music, the hills were alive with a blaze of color. Extraordinary every time you see it, but impossible to photograph properly without all the mega-equipment I see some people wielding. So with some of these you’ll need to use your imagination to fill in the details.
I’ll be posting a couple today, and some more in days to come.
The distant:
I stopped at one spot on the Kancamagus Highway called Lower Falls, where the water reflections of the trees were as astounding as the trees themselves:
Close to home:
Thanks for the glimpses of Nature’s beauty.
So lovely and so lovely….. nobody, not even the wind, has such small hands and such high definition.
Lovely. Thank you.
God -slash- Mother Nature sure can put on a show when He -slash- She feels the urge!
neo, thanks for sharing!
I spent my first 14 years in Brooklyn. We used to go to the zoo to see the tree. It had its own cage, and we’d buy bags of water for a nickel to throw at it at feeding time. Then my family moved to Milwaukee, and as I got off the plane, I can remember wondering what all that green sh*t all over the ground was.
Fifteen years later, working my first job out of college, I was scheduled to do an audit trip though New England in October. It was my first trip back east, and I decided to drive, up through Michigan, across into Canada, on the Queen’s Highway, then through Vermont and New Hampshire.
I heard on the radio that this was going to be a beautiful weekend. Right – trees, more green sh*t.
By the time I got within a hundred miles of Vermont, I was pulling over every few miles to take pictures and gawk. Each tree was like a rainbow, and there were whole mountainsides filled with them. The entire drive through New England was the most spectacular sight I’d ever seen.
Early fall in Cleveland. Took these a couple of days ago.
Yes lovely pics, shame they weren’t taken with a real camera, something like if you want to spend some money, a Fuji X-T10, you’d have everything in a small camera that overloaded camera nuts lug around. An 18-55 lens, and you’d be set!
http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x-t10.htm
If the 18-55 is still too big for you, go for just the 27mm, you’d hardly know you’re carrying a camera and you’d get superb quality.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x-mount-lenses/27mm-f28.htm
our *killing frost* scheduled for southern NH tonite 28 degrees, tomorrow nite 25 . I brought in my Impatients, Geranium & petunia tub. Much to the consternation of my hubby who says “You are just delaying their death sentence!”
Nice photos. Lots of fall colors here in NE Iowa. First hard freeze this morning but temps rebound Monday. Have a great autumn everyone.
@ligneus
Sony Rx100. Fits in your pocket but takes really good photos. I took one to Venice. This is Burano (FB resolution).
PatD, those leaf pics are nice, thanks.
Very nice…..
Beautiful photos! As for the camera, well, most landscape photos are taken with a small aperture in order to get great depth of field. A small aperture is the main “feature” of a p-and-s camera. More expensive cameras get you better capability for low light (not much needed for fall color photos, although really early morning or late, late afternoon shots can surprise with the amount of color that an expensive camera can “see”), and little else applicable to foliage shooting. Only other thing I can think of offhand is that sometimes you need a fast shutter speed because wind moves the leaves, and to get a fast shutter speed you may need a large aperture. Most of the time, for landscapes, a p-and-s is as good as they come.
Besides, the photographer takes the photo, the camera is only an assistant.
The best camera is the one you have with you.
Lovely!
I agree some of the p & s cameras and cell phone cameras are quite amazing, fact remains though with a ‘proper’ camera you get sharper, more detail and better color and if you don’t mind the bit extra weight of a zoom you get increased options, specially on the wide angle end.
Wonnerful, wonnerful. While I have resided in TX for decades, I grew up in the New England countryside surrounded by woods, swamp, and meadows. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away, and if you walked due east or due west from my childhood home, you wouldn’t hit a road for over a mile. Due north, a half mile. Country, not suburban. As a child I spent a lot of time in the woods. These photos give me a touch of saudade.
While I loved fall, the strongest images of the New England landscape of my childhood and early adulthood are from winter. There is a stark beauty about a New England winter that impresses. Secretary of State Kerry would probably say,”seared into his brain.” It wasn’t just me that winter impressed. A childhood peer wrote a memoir. In his memoir, the remembered landscapes from his New England childhood were also from winter. Why is that ? Don’t know. Perhaps because it takes greater effort to survive in the cold, you are more alert.
Walking after midnight in the winter, seeing the starlit sky reflected off the snow on the ground gave me a feeling of stillness, of awe at the infinite.
Gringo:
you might really really like this book.
Neo, I think I might really really like the book. I have a painting my father did of my childhood home in winter. He took a painting class one year- didn’t do many more paintings. Both my siblings live in Maine- though my sister and her husband also do the snowbird thing down South.
There’s a lot I like about New England, but not its current politics. While my political changes took decades, the roots of my changes can be traced back to New England. Many conclusions I drew about people and their political beliefs were based on my childhood and early adulthood in New England. One sibling is a Pub; the other is a Demo.
But right now, I think I’ll take a TX winter over a NE winter- not that I didn’t adapt well to the weather on my cold weather trips to NE. Just remember to layer.
I used to live near Hanover, NH, on the Vermont border, so not ‘in’ either the Green Mountains or the White Mountains. All the same, autumn was like a gift, a bright and uplifting gift! I felt so blessed to be amidst such incredible beauty.
nice. but its VERY VERY hard to photograph scenery well (ergo the acclaim of ansel adams)… the image in the camera almost never conveys the message that the photographer wants to convey when they lift the camera up to record then share it…
on another note..
The Black Monday crash of 1987, in which the market dropped 22%, took place on October 19.
A few years ago in the fall I drove up highway 81 which goes up the Shenandoah valley in Virginia. The trees were gorgeous.