Fall colors

Autumn Ash
walkabout_001_DSC09610
Bald cypress shelter tree
This is one of my favorite views, the way the cypress gently lays a skirt on the ground to the sides, inviting you in to the middle, promising shelter. with the colorful and interesting circle behind to the left. As it happens, a hammock works great between these two. Keeping it clear of poison ivy, bush honeysuckle and winter green is an annual chore. On hands and knees. The far side has a bunch of mint mixed in with the native herb growth aroud the skirt.

These shots are from the south yard, looking up past the sassafrass tree over the roof (not visible) to the big pine on the other side of the house. Need to redo this with a much higher f-stop, but this lens only goes to 22. Either one works as is, cropped some and the dust spot touched out, but depth of field only let me have one or the other in focus. (There is software that can handle a pair of images like this, but it costs good money.)
As the needles of the bald cypress turn brown, they also lose weight. Unless there is some other reason the branches don't hang as low now. Typical beginner landscape photogrphy technical error: Including too much sky when doing a forest image. The sky is so much brighter than it is blown out. If your program mode averages the exposure, you get a very overexposed image and any detail in the distant background is impossible to recover. From most angles where the interior of the bald cypress skirt is visible, it is impossible to avoid a lighting situation that calls for HDR, for expanding the exposure range way beyond the "normal" range exposure values. Perhaps a tripod and a still day...

As the needles of the bald cypress turn brown, they also lose weight. Unless there is some other reason the branches don't hang as low now. Typical beginner landscape photogrphy technical error: Including too much sky when doing a forest image. The sky is so much brighter than it is blown out. If your program mode averages the exposure, you get a very overexposed image and any detail in the distant background is impossible to recover. From most angles where the interior of the bald cypress skirt is visible, it is impossible to avoid a lighting situation that calls for HDR, for expanding the exposure range way beyond the "normal" range exposure values. Perhaps a tripod and a still day...
The colors in the sassafrass are quite vivid against the pine. But again, the sky is blown out. And in this case HDR would not help much because the sky was a formless cloud cover, with very little definition in it.

Need to wade out and see how deep it is. This is about as low as I've seen it since the trees and bushes have grown up around it.
Got out with the camera a bit too late. A few minutes earlier, the whole sky was a dark bright red, very impressive.

Brandon Smith (Redwoodtwig)