The Sox were losing and it wasn’t looking good.

It was pretty dark outside. There seemed little likelihood the rains would vanish today. Maybe tomorrow will be merely cloudy. That’s the official forecast. I’m fine with cloudy. Often, photographs are better with clouds. Colors stay even and you don’t have to deal with the burned out areas. Even when you take your light reading on the brightest part of the photograph, in landscape photography there are multiple bright areas. You can’t control all of them, but I can try.

The maple really did turn red!

Meanwhile, I see the yellow leaves in the back woods are blowing off the trees. How fast these autumn days are passing, especially this year when we’ve had such a long, slow, warm autumn.

I grabbed my camera. Which reminded me I needed a different lens. I un-grabbed the camera. Found the lens I wanted. Stopped, briefly pondered if maybe I really wanted the wide-angle, decided I preferred the short telephoto which goes from modest wide-angle to 100 mm telephoto.

It was quite dark outside and this is not my fastest lens. I didn’t want to hang around pondering lenses until the light was gone, so I put the 12-50 on the camera and went out the front door. I would have gone further, except I realized I wasn’t wearing shoes.

I rarely wear shoes in the house. Sometimes, I keep a pair nearby for just such moments as this, but then I worry if leaving them available will tempt a dog to use them as a chew toy. No dog has chewed my shoes in years, but I spent 12 years with a nonstop mangler. I have a permanent edgy feeling about protecting everything. Who knows what might happen?

Today, all my shoes are elsewhere. Like … where they belong. I’ve gotten so neat I worry myself.

The best part of shooting wet trees is the soft glow they make. No bright sun to burn out the colors. Nice, flat lighting.

All of this intense detail in these leafy pictures uses a lot of pixels. These days, I pay for graphics space. It isn’t unusual after I finish processing a picture, I realize it’s huge. So I have a choice to lower the resolution or play with a filter that will lower the total size. This is where filters like “impressions” come into play. They give the photograph a lovely painted look … and they reduce the pixel size by as much as half. It’s a choice I have to make and I won’t be entirely happy regardless. At least the “painting” shots make a nice contrast with the “all in focus” shots.

Winter is easier. All the white snow uses hardly any pixels. Also, water and sky have relatively little detail. This problem only comes up when I’m shooting large landscapes, especially in the fall when there is so much texture and color.

So now you know why I play with photographs. It isn’t because they aren’t sharp enough. It’s that they are too sharp and too detailed. A woods full of leaves is a lot of pixels, my friends.

Categories: #foliage, #Photography, Autumn, Blackstone Valley

Tags: #foliage, #Photography, autumn, Landscape photography, Rain