Searching for Autumn Color - Page 2

As a follow-up to my little excursion last Wednesday, which I commented on in the prior blog post, I decided that I would take last Friday (a week ago today) and explore a bit of southern New Hampshire. My goal was to drive "the long way" to Jaffrey, New Hampshire and the Mt.  Monadnock area.

For the first time in five or six years I brought along (and used) a polarizing filter. I was expecting a bright  blue sky and puffy clouds, and thought the polarizer would give me some really nice results. 

Even though I am happy with how the sky and clouds turned out in the images, I'm not completely convinced that a polarizer is worth the hassle.  That's because with software like Photoshop and Lightroom, it is fairly easy to approximate a polarized look by adjusting saturation and luminescence sliders. The results are not quite as nice as what a polarizer can do, but it takes no fumbling with additional equipment in the field. And some would even argue that adding a filter on top of a lens downgrades image quality by adding more glass layers through which light must travel. I can certainly say that it creates two more glass surfaces that must be kept clean!

A hassle (for me) is that the sun must come from a specific angle for the polarizer to have full impact. In addition, for each shot, I need to remove the lens hood to be able to rotate the polarizer to its proper placement for that specific composition.  Following that, the hood must be replaced, while at the same time hoping that the action of twisting the hood onto the lens does not also rotate the polarizer.

All that being said, I do plan to experiment more with polarizers. Not only when the sky is blue, but also for close-ups of flowers and foliage, where in many situations the polarizer can reduce glare and make colors richer.

A few from my fall excursion to Jaffrey:

In the center and in the distance is Mt. Monadnock.

The perspective of the 24mm-e lens used here makes it look

smaller and further away than it actually is.

Searching for autumn color - page 1

For years I have been trying to get into the mountains of northern New England at peak foliage time. But something always seems to come up.  I have no complaint this year, but a late September vacation in Maine (a couple of weeks before the peak) meant instead catching up with things at home and work when we returned.

It seems I missed it again.

I was talking with friends living in Franconia, NH and Bethel, Maine last week. They told me that things were actually past peak.  So, I decided that on Wednesday I would take the afternoon off and drive into an area of red on the map below. It was time to get some foliage shots.

I have just a few decent pictures to show for this, but I thought that before I did, I'd mention a very helpful tool for tracking the foliage throughout the USA.  It's a Web site run by Yankee Magazine called www.yankeefoliage.com.  There's an app, too!  It's call Leaf Peepr, and it's available for Android and Apple devices. The following link will take you to the Yankee Web site where you can access the Apple Store and Google Play:

http://www.yankeefoliage.com/fmaps/leaf-peepr

Here's a screenshot of what the app reported to me on my iPad:

Images from Wednesday

Stuck against a background of yellow maple leaves was the

lone red one.  I shot looking up from under the tree, which

accounts for the backlighting.

The Squannacock River, Townsend, MA