Autumn Colours - an alternative approach

 

Autumn colours are everywhere at present and photographers will travel miles for a killer picture. New England in The Fall is on many a photographer's bucket list. But in the days of a pandemic and limited travel we may have to look closer to home. 

I am lucky in living near the edge of the Wolds as they start to reach out north from the banks of the Humber. The trails which lead through Welton, Brantingham and South Cave before running up towards Market Weighton through the Drewton Estate are heavily wooded and a delight to walk through in October and early November. So I set myself a challenge to walk up Brantingham Dale Road and cut off through the woodland path to South Cave and create some less than usual photographs of autumn colours yesterday. I limited myself to an hour as part of the challenge and as the weather was very variable. I also made a decison to take standard photographs, such as that above, but also to use both multiple exposure and intentional camera movement (ICM) to gain some more abstract records of my walk.

Anyone using these techniques will know that there is a degree of luck involved although you can reduce that by really thinking about the colours you are wanting in the frame, the exposure times you are allowing and the number of frames you are stacking. The greater the number of frames the more critical the exposure time and this usually needs a bit of tweaking as you see the results. I started with a stack of four frames eventually reducing this to two. The less frames you stack the more definition you may get in the picture (see the next frame below). My exposure times varied from half a second when I decided to use ICM to 1/160 when I took single frame, standard pictures.

As I always shoot in RAW I post-process in Lightroom and the images nearly all benefitted from some manipulation of the texture and colour to deepen the tones and vibrancy. Sometimes that was quickly achieved by using the overall saturation and vibrancy tools but others I achieved through working on the hue, saturation and luminance of individual colours.

Whether or not you like this type of photograph it is always interesting to see the results. The pictures here are a selection from the 129 pictures I took in the hour available. The time in post production is probably twice that of the walk at least! Comments on blogs are always welcomed whether they are constructive criticism or questions raised so do leave a comment if you wish and I will always respond.