More leaves, less words. These pictures seem to become more interesting the more time I spend editing and closely looking at them. And not only on the main subject, the leaves, but also on the way they interact with their environment. Can’t help it – I really like those images.
Despite of the frost the bramble leaves have kept a marvellous deep red, so deep that indeed I decided to turn down the saturation a bit in order to avoid an artificial ‘vivid’ look that was significantly enhanced by the warm sunrise light. The birch leaves did not need such treatment, their thick and meanwhile dry material does not glow to the same extent as the bramble’s do.
The various groups of birches, just at the border of the tarn and interspersed into the pines in the elevated areas form excellent graphical elements with their white bark. The morning hours were not really cold, especially not for november, but this year we have the warmest november since 35 years.
Oh, but don’t care – our elected and not so elected leaders won’t bother when meeting in Kopenhagen (at least most of them). The most important thing is this generation’s prosperity – which is only relative when 1/6th of the world’s most affluent state had to live in ‘food uncertainty’ in 2007.
Song of the day? ‘Oh what a wonderful world’. What else.
Update: try to see the pictures at least in 1024px height by clicking on them – the downscaling to the posted size lets vanish quite some details.
The weekend was weather-wise pretty much grey in grey, so this picture from last week might be a good representation. It is the time between the bright colors of fall and the beginning non-colors of early winter, where the drizzle is still stronger than the snow. But it is the first year where I can photographically enjoy this time, too. Only partially it has to do with good gloves and a good tripod, the bigger part is a fresher, free view that identifies beauty in more of its incarnations.
November is in Germany also called ‘month of the dead’. The grey, cold weather, lack of daylight, falling of the leaves, all this is usually associated with death. And yes, during spring or midsummer, I would probably not have had the idea to capture the special mood of a cemetery, but now in November I did. The urn graves section of our cemetary was extended recently, and in a matching and harmonic way, as I think. Today’s images are from this part of the cemetary. Again I think, the wide open f-stop adds to the mood, to the vibrations of the image.
The Stihl sound is quite different from the steel guitar sound, despite of similar sounds of the words. The first one is giving these days an almoust continous concerto. It’s end is not yet foreseeable as the trees still have good stock of leaves to distribute.
Oh, and if you wont to see wonderful portrait of a single leaf, hurry to head over to the Capture this blog of Laurie Jackson. Definitely worth a look!
I still can’t get enough of my 85mm lens – after years with zooms in the f3.5 upwards speed class, beeing able to sharply differentiate by focus and to include informative background without letting it get too prominent is a welcome experience. And it leaves me wondering why lenses like this have become so rare and consequently expensive, if available at all. In the good old film days, when the Mamas and Papas sang “All the leaves are brown”, those f1,8, f1.4 50mm lenses became popular – and cheap. They were the bread and butter lenses, and some of them were of outstanding optical quality. For the DSLRs building a f1.4 50mm lens should not have become more difficult, on the contrary: the smaller image area for an APS-C sensor should have made it possible to produce smaller and cheaper lenses with the same quality. But instead the zoom fever set in, and part of the high-iso discussion we see now, is fired by the low speed of the lenses.
And fast primes, if we can get them, sell for mid- to really high prices. Only for those brands that did not see major changes in the lens mount, the 2nd hand market offers alternatives.
An evening hike, a bit away from the wanderers’ tracks, invited me into the brushwood. It was dark, cold, humid, and a nice smell of funghi (mostly decaying already) in the air, but not until turning around and searching my way back I found something suitable for an image: a flame like beech, gleaming in red and yellow, and impressive against the blue evening light and the dark-greenish fir twigs.
Not related to today’s historical date, these maple leaves grabbed my attention because of their graphical complementarity.
Wandering along some paths not that frequented any more I came along that bench which seems to be quite advanced on its way back into a primordial level in nature’s circuit. The more frequent guests here are probably chipmunks and birds for whom the capacity of the wooden boards should still be sufficient.
The dark colors of the evening light were quite challenging again, and to get that dark mood back into the image I finally resorted to a vignetting-like mask in lightzone. For quite a while I hadn’t used this program any more, but here the application of the relight tool to carefully improve the detail structures in the leaves gave me the results I wanted. And as this image was made with a tripod, the sophisticated noise reduction of bibble was not necessary.
One of those golden autumn days we had today. In the evening I went to one of the creeks, but the best image of today turned out to be this one, taken on the way to the post office – the sun in the spa gardens was warm and inviting. Inviting for this leaf probably, too, to dry up a little bit more and fall down, leaving the twigs bare until next spring.
After a long dry period now autumn rain calls the shots. Here in Bad Reichenhall lmost all fountains are switched off and covered by now, with the ones in the spa gardens as lonely exception. But the water doesn’t spray in the fountain any more, instead cold raindrops make strolling a different experience.
The gold of the maple leaves slowly starts to fade, and sometimes it seems as if this cold and this humidity, that reinforces the felt coldness, also affects the passers-by – head between shoulders, viewing straight ahead now everybody tries to minimize the time she spends outside of buildings. Winter doesn’t seem to be far anymore.
