Well, it sure took long enough, but I finally found a place local to me that had some beautiful fall color photo opportunities.
This is not something I normally have when it is as dry as it has been recently. Let me explain…
I am no scientist but I have stayed in a Holiday Inn before, so here goes. From what I have seen, there are three different scenarios that usually unfold around here in the fall.
The first event is like this, we get plenty of rain in the spring, it dries out a little in the mid summer months and then it starts to rain in late September or early October. This is actually the best possible scenario from what I can tell…
The second scenario is the same as the first one except the rain turns into a thunderstorm storm with heavy rain and usually high winds during peak color season, knocking all the leaves off of the trees.
Then there is option three, this one is where there is rain in the spring but then it is dry for the entirety of summer and fall. This is the type of season we are in now. There has not been enough rain to matter in two months…maybe more. It is so little water that the creek next to my house has no surface water in it as of this writing.
Of the three events, the first one is the preferred for fall color photos as there is sufficient water for the trees to transition normally to their dormant winter state and you get this incredible color display in the fall. This year though, we have event three where everything is a huge tinderbox and the leaves are simply drying out and turning brown then falling off of the trees without passing through their color phase at all…except…in the few places where there is still ground water to water the trees.
Enter North Chickamauga Creek WMA near Soddy Daisy Tennessee. This is a small WMA (Wildlife Management Area) situated in a gorge next to Mowbray mountain and is a popular spot for the locals to cool off in the summertime in the river. Well, the river is just a brook at this point and is barely moving at all, BUT it is there! If you watch my YouTube video on it you will see what I mean. Even so, there is still enough water to feed the trees so they had a fall color change.
Since I found some colors this year, I now had to figure out what I wanted to use to capture all this color with. I finally settled on my camera being the Leica SL2 as it has a high resolution sensor and several other features that lend itself to being a wonderful landscape photography camera. You see the Leica SL2 is a mirrorless camera so it can be adapted to various vintage lenses really easily and we all know how I love using vintage lenses! So today’s lens of choice for the Leica is the Nikkor 28mm f2.8 AiS. This is one of Nikon’s crowning achievements in lens design as it was as close to optical perfection as they had ever gotten to that point. So naturally I used this lens.
The magic of the Leica SL2 as well is that it has IBIS on the sensor. This basically turns all my vintage lenses into stabilized lenses. I know there are a ton of other cameras that also have these same features but I just like the Leica SL2 for some reason.
Now that the camera setup is settled, next is finding the photo I want. I started out looking for macro level images, vistas and scenes, then I moved in closer to get more detailed image ideas. The first one is shown above of the red maple tree in a sea of yellow. Then I moved to the river bed and found some wonderful colors out in the open.
This was literally what I was greeted with when I looked upstream from where I entered the river bottom. Not much water, but I got such a color splash from the trees that I didn’t even care. I would have liked for it to not be overcast, but you take what you can get and work with it. I really love this image too, so much texture and color in one image that is is almost overwhelming. I was really starting to embrace the look that the 28mm lens was giving me and then I decided to move upstream to that large boulder you see in the above photo and get a different perspective from that spot.
The little smidgen of sky showing the over cast clouds almost makes it otherworldly or something like that. I was blown away with this image when I got it into Lightroom and was able to see it better. It almost doesn’t look real back up in the valley next to the sky. The clouds were epic! This is also shot hand held with the 28mm lens. What is nice is that it allowed me to be very agile and not have the burden of the back pack and a tripod with me at all. There is something to be said for simplicity…
So in summary, if you want to find fall colors even when it has been really dry, find the water. Where ever there is water, there will be fall colors. At least that is what I have seen, your mileage may vary.