Jubilee College State Park

I have had bad timing with weather, travel, and motivation to properly schedule a local Fall color walkabout. There was total cloud cover but it looked like there might be some “holes” in the cloud where the sun might peek through, which I wanted to capture as shafts of light highlighting the fall colors. Well, the “hole” turned out to be the entire sky and the vantage point I had picked out along the river didn’t have any leaves on trees… so none of that worked out. I just hiked down to to the river bed to see if I could find any intimate details.

The river bank was very muddy, covered in dead brown leaves, and looked quite bleak. Except near the shore there was this clump of life floating on the surface of the shallow water over dead leaves that had sunk creating a stark contrast. I setup the camera almost looking vertically down (I need a taller tripod to avoid minimum focusing distance issue when going fully vertical). The goal of this shot was to capture detail which was a success but I’m not happy with the composition even after a crop.

I shot a couple other compositions without any great success. The first was a long exposure to try to capture some reflection in the water and “smooth out” the ripples from the breeze (shot with a circular polarizer and a 6 stop ND filter). The second one is just a quick shot of the trail section that had the most Fall colors.

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