Tag: Autumn

2021 Fall Foliage Road Trip

The Gray Bull on November 2, 2021

It has been quite a long time since my last post. The Covid-19 Pandemic has restricted travel for many people in the past 18 months! Recently, my wife and I decided it was time to break out of our cocoon and take a trip. Since we have both received our full vaccinations, it seemed that a car trip would be safe. Autumn has arrived and what better place to see spectacular fall foliage that in New England! I wanted to share some photos from that trip with you.

Just before entering Vermont, we arrived at a beautiful reservoir lake near the border of New York and Vermont. As we drove by, the reflections on the lake caught my eye. I left the highway and drove on a side road to an open spot and took photos.

Continuing into Vermont, we stopped at the Visitor Center in Bennington for a brief respite. As I was talking with two of the staff, they proceeded to tell me the peak foliage had not yet occurred due to the warm weather. The date of our conversation was October 6^th and as we drove thru Vermont and New Hampshire, I do not know how the color could have been any better a few days later! The photo below is the view from Vermont’s Bromley Ski Resort.

The rest of that day was filled with more fantastic fall color, and I stopped frequently to take more photos. Our drive took us to Lincoln, New Hampshire where we spent the night. The next day was spent driving along the scenic Kancamagus Highway and the White Mountain Trail in New Hampshire. The photo below is from an overlook on the Kancamagus, and the high peak is Mount Osceola. Which is the name of a Native American Tribal Chief.

Mount Osceola is the highest peak in the small Sandwich Range, it is 4.315 feet in altitude. The Sandwich Range is part New Hampshire’s White Mountains. One of my favorite photos from this trip is the one below of that mountain range.

The next photo is the view from Crawford Notch on the White Mountain Trail. The mountain is Mount Willey. In 1826, a family named Willey lived on this mountain and they all perished in an avalanche in 1826.

Remember, I was advised that the color had not yet reached peak conditions. I do not know how it could be any more fabulous than what we saw! What do you think?

Thank you for visiting my blog!

Blog Posts

Autumn Shadows

The Gray Bull on November 7, 2020

A couple of days ago I was sitting on my deck and gazing into the woods behind the house when I noticed the sunlight filtering through the trees. The leaves and grass had changed from their early autumn color to a richer and more colorful hue. That looked great, but it was the shadows that the sunlight created that forced me to get up from a comfortable chair and go and get my camera! The photo below is the one I decided to post. I used the Adobe Landscape Profile and adjusted the hue in the shadows, but that is about all the post-processing I did for this photo.

Blog Posts

Great Falls Park

The Gray Bull on November 9, 2019

Great Falls Park is one of the U.S. National Park Service’s small parks in and around the Washington D.C metro area (https://www.nps.gov/grfa/index.htm). It also happens to be only about 10 miles from my home. Last week two of my granddaughters had a school holiday, so we decided to picnic at the park. The day turned out to be a beautiful, late autumn afternoon and food always tastes better at a picnic outdoors!

While the girls were playing, I took a short walk to one of the overlooks of the falls on the Potomac River. I had brought my camera, so I proceeded to take numerous photos of the falls. While processing the photos at home, I picked three of them to present in this blog post. Lately, I have become enamored with black and white photography, so I converted these to black and white by utilizing DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 after the initial processing in Adobe Lightroom. I prefer the black and white photos.

Great Falls-0007

Color Image processed with Adobe Lightroom

Great Falls-0007-Edit

Black and White version processed with DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 Preset #043 More Silver

Great Falls-0008

Color Image Processed with Adobe Lightroom. In the bottom of the photo you can see a kayaker trying to row upstream. He never made it!

Great Falls-0008-Edit

Black and White version processed with DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 Preset #023 Wet Rocks

Great Falls-0038

The last image was shot at 1/125 of a second shutter speed to stop the action of the rapids. Again, in the bottom of the photo you can see another kayaker trying to row upstream, he also failed to do that! Color Image processed with Adobe Lightroom

Great Falls-0038-Edit

Black and White version processed with DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 – no presets, just a few adjustments and a red color filter.

Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to go with me on my photographic journey to become a better photographer.

Blog Posts

10 Adjustments or Less

The Gray Bull on November 4, 2019

The other day, I drove to my granddaughter’s high school theatre performance. Usually, when I go to this type of event, I take my camera. This day was no exception. Since I would be taking a few photographs after the performance, I did not bring anything other than the camera and its holster. As it happened, that evening a thunderstorm was forecasted to occur during the play. After parking my car, I looked at the sky and could see some threatening clouds beginning to appear. I got creative and placed my camera on the holster as a support base, set the aperture at f18 and the ISO at 100. This gave me a somewhat long exposure, but not nearly a slow enough one. I took a few photos and proceeded to go to the play.

The next day, I imported the photos into Adobe Lightroom and viewed them. Unfortunately, none were very good, which was not a surprise. I decided to have a little fun with post-processing attempting to process one of the photos with only 10 adjustments or less. The software I used was Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and DxO’s Silver Efex Pro 2. My goal was not to make all the versions look the same but to see what type of variety I would get with only a few adjustments. Here are the resulting photos processed with 10 or less adjustments to the original RAW file.

The first photo is the original file with only the camera calibration adjusted.

Original Capture-0006

The next photo is a color version done in Adobe Lightroom and with 10 adjustments.

Color Version-0006

I then decided to convert the photo to Black & White versions with Lightroom, Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro 2. The photo below is the Lightroom conversion in less than 10 adjustments.

Lightroom Version-0006

The adjusted color version was exported to Photoshop and in 10 adjustments I obtained the photo shown below.

Photoshop Version-2

The last version is the adjusted color version edited in Silver Efex Pro 2 with less than 10 adjustments.

Silver Efex Pro 2 Version-

None of these versions would win any awards but it was an interesting exercise in post-processing. Please come back and visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me next time.

Blog Posts

Philadelphia Panorama Photos

The Gray Bull on November 6, 2018

The title for this blogpost makes use of the letter P three times and that is a lot. It is also appropriate because this blogpost is about taking many photos and creating a panorama. It is also a blogpost that prominently (another P) displays my rather poor skill in shooting panoramas. That is ok because this blog is about my journey to becoming a better photographer and what I learn along the way.

Last week, my wife and I took a day trip to Philadelphia and I brought my camera and tripod along specifically to try a few cityscape panoramas. I had only done one panorama before this attempt; therefore, I thought it was time to explore the technique. I decided to not look at any videos beforehand to prepare myself just to do something different as a challenge. I am guessing that some of you readers also experiment this way but most probably try to learn a new technique prior to putting the camera on a tripod. The later technique certainly makes more sense than my approach, but I like to take risk!

I made quite a few mistakes and these photos show those errors, but I think I did learn a lot in this experiment. Rather than list all of my mistakes, I’ll let you look at the photos and figure out what went wrong for yourself. I read in a photo magazine that analyzing photos done by others is a good practice to help you refine your own skills, so hopefully these photos will help all of you!

The three photos below were all taken from Camden, NJ looking across the Delaware River towards Philadelphia. I used Adobe Lightroom to stitch the photos together into a panorama. The first photo is a monochrome conversion that consists of 7 individual photos.

untitled shoot-5036-Pano

The next photo was taken from a similar location and consists of 6 individual photos.

untitled shoot-5042-Pano

I tried a different approach on the next photo and used 12 individual photos for it. It should be clear what went wrong with this photo.

untitled shoot-5081-Pano

After going to lunch with my wife at a riverside sports bar we drove across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia. I wanted to take a photo from the South Street Bridge near the University of Pennsylvania campus. This panorama consists of four photos. This was probably the best photo of the group.

Autumn in Philadelphia

When I returned home it was time to go to my photography school of choice, YouTube.com. There are many great videos here and I found several on creating panoramas. After viewing these videos and then looking at my photos I can certainly see how to do an improved panorama photo shoot on my next opportunity. Hopefully, you managed to dissect these photos, and in the process learned more about taking panoramas.

Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to check on my progress in becoming a better photographer.

Blog Posts

West Virginia Fall Foliage

The Gray Bull on October 15, 2017

At the conclusion of my last blog post, I mentioned that I would be taking a trip to West Virginia to view the fall foliage. My wife and I decided to travel on the Highland Scenic Highway in West Virginia. This is an approximately 91-mile highway that goes through the Monongahela National Forest. This was planned to be a simple daytrip so we packed a picnic lunch and planned stops to take photographs along the way and return home around 8 PM.

My wife and I lived in Colorado for approximately 20 years and had the opportunity to see the fall foliage change in the great Rocky Mountains. The colors there were bright and spectacular due to the leaves of the Aspen Trees that dominate the mountains. The foliage in West Virginia is very different primarily because there is a greater variety of trees in this area. This led to a tremendous variation in the color and vibrancy of the fall foliage in West Virginia. Our trip took place probably a few days in advance of the peaking of the fall foliage, but nonetheless we saw some very picturesque scenes. Overall, the colors were much more muted than what we were used to in Colorado.

Shortly after entering West Virginia I decided to turn off the main road to see if there were any interesting sites to photograph. Very quickly I came upon the scene of a silo in a field along with a small shed and I decided to stop and capture that shot. I had to walk through the farm field to get in position to take this picture and fortunately the field was dry that day otherwise I would’ve been a muddy mess.

Silo in Autumn

Many of you who have been to Washington, D.C. have seen the Potomac River. It separates the District of Columbia from Virginia and Virginia from Maryland. During the summer months you see many boats, sailboards and kayaks on the river. As we were driving thru West Virginia we saw the North Fork of the Potomac River. It is significantly narrower and much shallower than the Potomac River in D.C.

North Fortk of Potomac River

As we approached the Monongahela Forest, I stopped at the Ranger station to get some suggestions on good locations to photograph. The Ranger was very helpful; however, he did tell me that there was a small forest fire in one of the areas that he would usually recommend, as it happened that area was called Smoke Hole Canyon! Unfortunately, we would not be able to view the area but he did give me some other suggestions. As we continued our drive I happened to notice a road named Smoke Hole Road and decided to turn and go up that road to see what was there. The first photograph is from a small bridge on this road overlooking a pond with some beautiful reflections of the mountains above.

Autumn Reflection-2

We continued to drive up the road and noticed the smoke that was very slightly obscuring the view of the mountains in the distance along with the distinct smell of wood burning. But we could tell the fire was nowhere near us at that point. We came upon a small clearing and pulled the car over, parked and enjoyed a great picnic lunch! This is the photograph that I took directly in front of where we stopped to have our lunch.

Curves-

By now it was around 1 o’clock in the afternoon so we decided to go back the way we came and photograph some of the sights that we saw as we were driving up the mountain. Here are a few of those photographs.

We left the forest and returned to the main highway and proceeded to drive home. I noticed a scenic overlook sign and pulled over into the parking lot. We looked around and thought it was not much of a scenic overlook until I noticed a trail leading up the hill behind us. My wife decided to stay in the car and wait. I grabbed my gear and hiked up the hill. After a short climb a very nice view did come into focus. Cutting right through the scene below me was the highway that we had just left. I slightly raised the angle of my camera to crop out the highway and this is the photo that I captured.

Appalachian Autumn

I hope you enjoyed traveling with us on our short drive through West Virginia to enjoy the fall foliage. Please come back to visit http://www.cestlavie4me.com to view some photographs from my recent visit to the U.S. Library of Congress here in Washington DC. It is not only the largest library in the world but the Jefferson building is a beautiful architectural delight! I think you’ll enjoy the photos. Au revoir!