After last week's exhaustive and exhausting
article about exposure, I through it would nice for me, and a relief for my readers, to write about something simple. For a landscape photographer there may
be few things as simple as a single tree, but even with that narrow focus there
is much to explore and this is especially true amidst the restless changes of a
New England Autumn.
By the beginning of last week I had largely given up
on brilliant autumn color for this year. I knew that I had to be satisfied with
the dull, but persistent orange of the oaks and the occasional splashes of
yellow from the obstinate Beech trees, but then I stepped out of my door and saw
our Japanese Maple.
Over the years I have planted many trees around our
house. A Red Maple, and a Norway Maple along our stone wall, 9 Apple and two 
Pear Trees in the field across the street and a Birch that never really took
off, but the little Japanese Maple was there when we moved in. Over 35 years it
has thrived despite our general neglect and the fact that it is located in a
shady north corner of our property which has been otherwise fit only for moss,
moles and rotting firewood. The tree has survived these insults remarkably well,
but I swear it hasn't grown an inch in over three decades.
I assume that
it is a dwarf variety, still standing only about 10 feet high, but this week,
despite the general November devastation, the tree was aflame with color ranging
from brilliant crimson to electric yellow. Obviously, I took a picture, but then
I decided to capture the tree in more detail. Over this last week I tried to
explore this brave little tree in a variety of ways. I followed the Maple's
fantastically colorful show through to its remarkably sudden and inevitable
surrender to the elements. What follows is a brief album celebrating that
journey.
Full Color
At the beginning of the week the Japanese Maple
was in full color and, despite the bare branches of trees all around, it was
tenaciously clinging to its leaves. Seeing the brilliance of the reds in these 
images, it would be reasonable to think that I had leaned heavily on the
saturation slider in Photoshop, but in most situations I actually reduced the
red saturation to bring the color into a manageable gamut. The color was really
that bright. As I mentioned this tree is tucked away in a back corner of our
property and it was a challenge to find angles that would show the tree's full
glory. Most view points had backgrounds complicated by our house to the side or
the gazebo in front. To get a clear view, I had to take down our cloth lines and
found a side view which showed how the tree was leaning to the south in a
desperate attempt to get more light.
Variation in Leaves
As I moved in
closer I was struck by the wide variation in color and pattern of the leaves.
This was probably related to the differences in the amount of light that struck
various branches. Colors ranged from deep dark reds to bright yellows and some
leaves had a stippled pattern of light and dark.
Over the next few days I had the opportunity to catch the tree in a
range intensities and angles of light. In the bright light the transilluminated
leaves became electric, while with soft overcast the full intensity of the color
could be seen without being muted by reflections. As always, my polarizing
filter help to bring out the colors even in softly diffused light.
Camera
Motion
The leaves were remarkable, but as I began to feel that my leaf
exploration was coming to a close, I knew that it was time to put the vegetation
in motion. I experimented with sweeps, circles and jiggles, but my favorite was
zooming. I liked the effect created when I started with a pause for a fraction
of a second and then zoomed out. By using ISO 100, a small aperture and the
polarizer, the shutter was slow enough to create the exploding color effect. It
all comes down to experimentation and the willingness to take enough pictures
for luck to kick in.
Infrared
Whenever I think about looking at things
with different eyes infrared immediately comes to mind. Whether the leaves are
deep red, yellow or mid-summer green, in the infrared spectrum they all come out
ghostly white.
Leaf Drop
The late season color of our Japanese Maple
was remarkable, but what was the most surprising was how suddenly the leaves all
crashed to the ground. Essentially overnight the tree went from full bloom to
nearly bare and without any unusual twist in the weather. No big storm or
blustery winds to force the leaves to the ground. Apparently the tree just
decided it was time. I was left with a few stragglers and a luxurious red
carpet.
Spending a week studying a single tree in its autumn glory and
inevitable surrender provided a couple of important lessons. First, that with
proper focus, even the largely barren November environment can still offer
surprising splashes of autumn color and that color can be even more striking
when contrasted with the somber melancholy of our "stick season". Secondly,
given my tendency to frantically jump from one scene to another, it was good to
be reminded that the exercise of restricting attention to one limited subject
can refresh the eye and allow us to see in many new and surprising ways.
Jeffrey
Newcomer
partridgebrookreflections.com
603-363-8338
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Shortly after our return the tree finally surrendered its leaves and I retreated to the studio for my usual November stick season work of editing the pile of autumn foliage and travel images, but then I was treated to one more unexpected splash of color.
Earlier this week, it was reported that there was a possibility of a display of the northern lights as far south as our home in southern New Hampshire. Many times, I have been disappointed by these predictions, with my endurance of night-time cold being rewarded only with blank colorless skies. Tuesday night, however, while accompanying Benji on his last lawn visit of the evening, I noticed a brilliant red swarth of color across the western sky. I grabbed my camera and raced to a vantage point on the edge of Spofford Lake, with an unobstructed view to the north. The red blotch was still hanging in the sky to the west, beginning to fade, but still visible to the unaided eye. I quickly set the camera on the tripod, made my best guess at infinity focus, and grabbed a couple of 30 second exposures at f 4.5 and an ISO of 400. Remarkably the red blasted through, although not with the flowing sheets of color that I expected. I later learned that the red color comes from activation of oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere, where they are less perturbed by currents that are more prevalent at lower altitudes. I was thrilled with the images but surprised that I wasn’t seeing much color to the north. Almost as an afterthought I shifted and grabbed one image from the dull sky to the north. Only later, as I examined the images on the computer, did I discover the interesting array of colors in the northern sky.
