Wordless Wednesday: Sparkling Autumn (Six Variations)
Category: photography
Autumn Flame at Oakland
Over the weekend — a pair of bright sunny days in the middle of two weeks of rain — I ventured into the neighborhood to see if the colors of autumn were making any progress. There’s still an enormous amount of green everywhere; many of the huge maples and oaks that form the area’s canopy haven’t started to change yet. On Saturday, I photo-walked Oakland Cemetery — a 48-acre Victorian garden cemetery, established in Atlanta in 1850 as one of the first such garden cemeteries created in the United States — and took the photos you can see in the gallery below. The extreme sunlight provided me with some challenges, as I think I’m more accustomed to — and photographically speaking, more comfortable with — trolling around in the woods and dealing with low-light rather than high-light conditions. Still, I think I ended out with some interesting results, and tried to capture how the yellows, oranges, and reds glowed in the sun, even with excessive backlighting that needed adjustment once I got home.
On Sunday, I took a similar walk through Grant Park, and I’m working through about 100 photos from spending the morning there. Look for those later in the week. 🙂
Select the first image below to begin a slideshow; as always, thanks for reading and taking a look!
Wordless Wednesday: Autumn Roadside Attractions
Autumn Close Up: A Photo Gallery
Over the past few weeks, I’ve posted a series of photos that I called “Single Frames: Autumn Close Up” — individual fall images paired with some reasonably relevant quotations, including a few “gothic” quotes as the days got shorter and darker and closed in on Halloween. I had originally picked out several dozen photos for this series, but I decided to stop at twenty and use the remaining photos a little differently in an upcoming blog post.
I’m working on that new post now; it will include additional autumn photos and some notes on reprocessing those photos with Lightroom and the Nik Collection. It will take me a few days to wrap that post up and prep the photos that go with it, so I thought in the meantime I’d assemble the “Single Frames: Autumn Close Up” images in a single gallery, which you can see below. I had started including all the quotes with the photos, but couldn’t find a good way to do that without creating a 20-foot long blog post.
If you’d like to see the original photos in this series with their quotations, I’ve tagged all twenty posts so they can be viewed together, here: Single Frames: Autumn Close Up.
They look kinda nice as a group like this; select the first image in the gallery to begin a slideshow.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #20
From John Muir Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies and Letters by John Muir:
“Most of the plants have gone to seed; berries are ripe; autumn tints begin to kindle and burn over meadow and grove, and a soft mellow haze in the morning sunbeams heralds the approach of Indian summer.”
Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #19
From John Muir Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies and Letters by John Muir:
“The grand color glow — the autumnal jubilee of ripe leaves — was past prime, but, freshened by the rain, was still making a fine show….”
Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #18
From John Muir Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies and Letters by John Muir:
“The forests we so admired in summer seem still more beautiful and sublime in this mellow autumn light.”
Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #17
From John Muir Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies and Letters by John Muir:
“The fir woods are delightful sauntering-grounds at any time of year, but most so in autumn. Then the noble trees are hushed in the hazy light, and drip with balsam; the cones are ripe, and the seeds, with their ample purple wings, mottle the air like flocks of butterflies; while deer feeding in the flowery openings between the groves, and birds and squirrels in the branches, make a pleasant stir which enriches the deep, brooding calm of the wilderness, and gives a peculiar impressiveness to every tree.”
Wordless (Halloween!) Wednesday: The House of the Seven Rat Zombies
Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #16
From the (very dark, extra-super-creepy, not for the squeamish, perfectly chilling for the day before Halloween but best not read at night) novel Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates:
“My name is Q__ P__ & I am thirty-one years old, three months. Height five feet ten, weight one hundred forty-seven pounds…. Distinguishing features: none….”
“I see my probation officer Mr. T__ alternate Thursdays 10 A.M., downtown Mt. Vernon. My therapist Dr. E__ Mondays 4 P.M., University Medical Center. Group therapy with Dr. B__ is Tuesdays 7 P.M. I am not doing well, I think…. I know they are writing reports. But I am not allowed to see. If one of these was a woman I would do better, I feel. They believe you, they are not always watching you. EYE CONTACT HAS BEEN MY DOWNFALL….”
“Mon. 4:00 P.M.-4:50 P.M. Mt. Vernon Medical Center on the other side of the campus, in good weather I walk & in bad weather drive…. Dr. E__ says ‘Well, Quentin. This brisk autumn air is a tonic isn’t it. After our long hot summer.’ There is a double meaning in this I know…. [It] is awkward in Dr. E__’s office. I sit across from his desk & stare at the floor. Or at my hands I have scrubbed. RAISINEYES’ wristwatch on my left arm & its bronze face secret where I watch the tiny numerals flashing bronze. & around my right wrist my solitary memento of SQUIRREL. Dr. E__ asks do I have any dreams to speak of today. There is a flurry of leaves against the window behind him & the sky is darkening so early….”