Hello, Everyone! I live in Southwest Virginia and the fall colors are starting to rev up in the lower elevations. So far, they're not doing so good in the mountains... I took a brief ride up on the Blue Ridge Parkway yesterday and things were pretty brown.
Still, down in the valley there are some nice patches of color. The challenge I've found as a photographer is to capture the color in an unusual way. Now, I know I'm not the first to utilize the technique of shooting foliage reflected in streams, but it's a pretty cool way to get some shots of the colors and I've found it imparts a very impressionistic - almost "Monet-esque" quality to some of the images.
A little more below the fold in terms of technique, equipment used etc.
All of these shots were taken on October 23rd and 24th. I used a Canon 1Ds Mark II camera body with an EF 24-105mm lens with a 77mm B+W Polarizer. I didn't use a tripod because I'm lazy, they're hard to set up in streams, and the lens I used has image-stabilization. This feature allows one to hand-hold lenses with long shutter speeds and still retain some sharpness.
A little about that polarizer thing because you photo geeks out there know that many times a polarizer is used to get RID of reflections - and they do. They are simply a filter that screws on the lens but a polarizing filter has a ring that the photographer turns to dial in - or out - the effect. The "effect" is apparent looking through the lens' viewfinder: For the most part it makes the sky much more blue, colors "pop" a bit more and as I mentioned above, minimize reflections.
But in this case I wanted reflections so why did I use a polarizer? Well, I only partially "dialed in" the effect because if I rotated the filter ring to bring about full polarization of the light entering the camera, the reflections would pretty much disappear entirely, leaving one with an image of the bottom of the stream. So I had to be careful not to do that. The trick is to dial in just a little of the effect - enough to enhance the colors a bit - but not too much as to do away with the reflections entirely.
In one of the shots (you can guess which) I used a technique where I stopped the lens down as far as it would go, which in turn gave me a pretty long shutter speed (about 1/2 a second) Then, as I pressed the shutter button, I turned the ring on my zoom lens to zoom it as the photograph was taken. This produces a sort of motion blur - as though the image is flying towards or away from you.
Oh, I also used a bit of my own, proprietary, Photoshop "Secret Sauce" in the post-production of the images. If anyone wants to know what I did, feel free to ask in the comments and I'll stay up as long as I can if anyone cares.
Well, that's enough yammering about photography for tonight. Meanwhile, I hope you guys enjoy some of the color we're having down in these parts, this month. Sigh... in only a few weeks, it'll all be gone!
Thanks for looking!