Capturing Autumn

Autumn Leaves and Trees

Autumn brings opportunities and dilemmas for photographers.  On the one hand the colours can be fantastic, especially if you know where there are some acers or other members of the maple family.  On the other hand, the light can be drab, and the weather can be wet and windy.

If you strike it lucky and you find yourself on a sunny day (hopefully without too much of a breeze) in October near to some obliging acers, as I did in the middle of October in Batsford Arboretum, then there is another dilemma – a bit like Writer’s Block.  There is so much colour, how do you capture the essence of autumn – do you take a landscape shot, will the colours really come out as you had hoped?  Do you go for a close up?  Will the light be good enough to get a hand held shot with a macro lens – if you take a tripod will it be still enough to make it worthwhile?  In other words, decision overload.

Out of all of the shots I took at Batsford I have decided to put this one on the blog – that is not to say that there won’t be others, I took the macro shots, I took the landscape shots, I tried the light in the woodland shots, but I thought this one captured my day more and was a little bit different – you may disagree (you are allowed).  The colour of the leaves on the floor sums up autumn for me, but the strong shadow of the tree from which they had fallen reminds me that we did have some bright sunny days in my two weeks off work.

For those who are interested in such things, ISO 200, handheld macro lens of all things (who would have thought?), f/6.3 (would have liked more but beggars can’t be choosers and I had been facing the other direction taking macro shots shortly before) and 1/200 secs.