Autumn is my favorite season, full of color and contrast. Growing up, I preferred summer due to its long light days, no school, and warm evenings. However as I have advanced in years, transitioned from school to work, and no longer am rewarded a respite from the daily grind, autumn has emerged as the season I look most forward to. It’s not just the most exciting time of year for photography, giving that ordinary landscapes explode in warm hues and present opportunities for the camera that can only be captured for a week or two until they fade into the greyness of winter. Autumn also is the culmination of my two favorite sports, the beginning of pro and college football and the World Series in baseball.
I will try from time to time to include sports blogposts as I try to balance my sports and landscape photography on the website. This post I have titled Lancaster Fall. On some years, I voyage somewhere grand to photograph the autumn landscape like New England or the Blue Ridge Mountains. But locally in Pennsylvania I need not go far to find many beautiful scenes before my present eyes.
Some fall days I would bring my camera to work and just be ready on my drive home to look out for fiery scenes such as the ones above. The east may not have the eye-popping pinnacles and dramatic spires that west to the Rockies can boast. But folks from the west come out east in October to catch the display of foliage transform like no other. Pennsylvania’s Lancaster countryside is littered with farms, silos, old mills, winding dirt roads, and back country woods. All of these can be incorporated to make pleasing photographs with a little time and patience (and maybe a little luck).
Polarizers work well to accentuate your colors, and if you have water in your shot, boosting the contrast for a pleasing background will fall leaves. On another blog sometime I will discuss Ricketts Glen State Park in Pennsylvania and its photographic potential in autumn. For this post, the goal is to make pleasing landscape images that can be near your front porch. Always look for interesting foregrounds, midgrounds, and backgrounds in your scenes that incorporate fall colors. Direction, intensity, and type of light are important for choosing when to photograph a scene.
Finally, if the scene doesn’t present itself make your own. I had seen an autumn photo on Webshots a long time ago of a simple tire swing hanging from a secluded maple tree in peak color. I had kept my eye out for years for a scene like that one but found no luck it what I came across. I thought, I’ll make my own scene. I obtained a used tire and rope from a local tire business and found a lone tree in a park that would make a good backlit subject. And bingo, I manipulated my timeless fall scene I always wanted. Sometimes that extra work, and the story that goes with it, are worth it for producing the image I had in my mind’s eye. Happy shooting this fall!
