“During these blessed color-days no cloud darkens the sky, the winds are gentle, and the landscape rests, hushed everywhere, and indescribably impressive. A few ducks are usually seen sailing on the lake, apparently more for pleasure than anything else, and the ouzels at the head of the rapids sing always; while robins, grosbeaks, and the Douglas squirrels are busy in the groves, making delightful company, and intensifying the feeling of grateful sequestration without ruffling the deep, hushed calm and peace.
“This autumnal mellowness usually lasts until the end of November. Then come days of quite another kind. The winter clouds grow, and bloom, and shed their starry crystals on every leaf and rock, and all the colors vanish like a sunset.”
Hello!
For this post, I took a closer look at the autumn ground featured in the previous one (see Autumn Groundcover (1 of 2)) and picked out a few prominent leaves that could be isolated and photographed with a macro lens. There are five such images below, followed by five additional recreations with the backgrounds rendered as black. On black backgrounds, the shapes, colors, and textures really stand out, don’t you think?
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year, they’re all organized under this tag:
“With the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. The plover is heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle of the leaves. The crows, too, begin now to congregate; you may stand and count them as they fly low and straggling over the landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at intervals of half a mile, until a hundred have passed.”
“In autumn, when the colors are ripe, the whole circular grove, at a little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup….”
Hello!
I spent one of my recent autumn photo-shoots looking mostly at the ground. Gravity and the fall wind position the leaves in some of the most delightful arrangements of shape, pattern, and color, so I set out to capture a few images where those arrangements caught my eye. Admittedly — since I’m basically an adult-adjacent kid at heart — some shuffling and kicking through the leaves did also occur… but not until after I took the photos!
While I was taking these pictures, I heard a leaf blower off in the distance, so it’s not impossible that some of these patterns were created by one of those satanic wind machines. I do own one, I’ll admit: it resides just inside my crawlspace door where it’s been idle for about a decade, gathering under-house dust while it rests there unused. It’s a “deluxe model” actually, one of those that you can use to vacuum up leaves which it then sucks through a grinder, reduces them to a fine powder, then deposits them in an attached (and very large) canvas bag. Sounds efficient, huh?
I used that capability once: the exploding noises made by leaves, sticks, and occasional bits of pea gravel getting pulverized a few inches from my stomach and groin just about drove me insane while I considered what would happen if the mechanism split open — which struck me as inevitable (though in real life wouldn’t happen, probably) and potentially life-changing (and not in a good way). What got the machine rendered into crawlspace oblivion however was an untended consequence of its mulching: since I live in an urban area and yard trimmings and debris have to be placed for curbside pickup in paper lawn bags, I had to transfer the ground leaves to those bags. So…
Imagine my surprise when I dumped the leaves from the stuffed canvas bag into a paper one and a cloud of leaf dust rose up like a desert sandstorm filling my back yard, covering the brick courtyard, the walls of the house, two windows, and a double-glass door — all of which I had to spend the next two hours hosing off and windexing until they were clean again. It’s probably true that I exaggerate here occasionally, for fun, just to entertain myself (and hopefully you’s)… but this is exactly what happened.
Later that same day… I went out and bought a new rake.
🙂
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year, they’re all organized under this tag:
“There are … the winds of autumn, those that whirl through the streets tearing the dry, ruddy-brown leaves from their moorings. Alive with the scents of fallen fruit and soil and smoke, the autumn wind teases our nostrils as it whooshes past, scattering the humped piles of carefully raked leaves, mingling their constituents with other leaves spiraling down from the branches…
“Our bodies witness this gradual release of leaves, this stripping away of color from the gray, skeletal limbs, and cannot help but feel that the animating life of things is slipping off into the air — that the wind moaning in our ears is composed of innumerable spirits leaving their visible bodies behind….
“The wind is haunted, alive. Only in this liminal season, before the onset of winter, does the wild psyche of the land assert itself so vividly that even the most rational persons find themselves lost, now and then, in the uncanny depths of the sensuous….”
Hello!
Below are a few images from my previous post — Autumn Yellow, Autumn Orange (1 of 2) — with their backgrounds converted to black. Yellow on black, orange on black …. hmmmmmm, gorgeous!
Click this link if you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year:
“As I go across a meadow directly towards a low rising ground this bright afternoon, I see, some fifty rods off toward the sun the top of a Maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet edge of the hill, a stripe apparently twenty rods long by ten feet deep, of the most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange and yellow equal to any flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted….
“As I advance, lowering the edge of the hill which makes the firm foreground or lower frame of the picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily increases, suggesting that the whole of the enclosed valley is filled with such color.”
Hello!
This is the first of a pair of posts featuring yellow and orange fall colors. They tend to be my favorite colors to photograph and post-process this time of year, as both are bright in shade or sun, and both create nice sharp contrasts with the backgrounds they appear in. More muted than the reds that also fill the autumn landscape, my eye or my camera or both always seem drawn to these color variations. With the reds it always seems harder to isolate individual leaves and branches and produce colors I’m satisfied with in Lightroom, but the yellows and oranges — woohoo!
🙂
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year, they’re all organized under this tag:
“Think how much the eyes of painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these autumnal colors….
“The stationer’s envelopes may be of very various tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have only to look further within or without the tree or the wood. These leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength, and left to set and dry there.”
Continuing with some autumn-color photography … here’s a collection featuring images of isolated leaves that turned early, mostly at the tips of branches, still hanging on in mid-November … but probably not for long.
🙂
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year (you might have missed one!), they’re all organized under the same tag, this one:
