October 19

Fall Photo Walk, November 3

The peak of leaf season is upon us. We’ve had entirely too many rainy days this week. I took advantage of the sunny skies this morning and took a walk through a local park that is heavy on sugar maples. Alas, there is too much to do this weekend or else I’d devote the entire day to capturing local scenery.

Does anyone else suddenly go cold at the thought of narrating one’s life? This happens to me from time to time, and it is not a good thing when one has a personal blog. It’s not that things are so bad that I’m better off not writing about them. Actually, matters have improved greatly since earlier in the year. I’m in less pain. My daughter seems to be enjoying school. Still, I haven’t felt inclined to write about the day to day.

I do have yet another bit of medical drama, but I don’t think the matter is anything serious. I’ve had periodic migraines since I was ten years old, but I had a migraine with aura for the very first time last month. My neurologist ordered a brain MRI. My appointment for the MRI review won’t happen until later this week, but I did get a disc copy of it per the ordering doctor’s request. Of course, I had to find a way to view the images on that disc before my appointment. Now that I’ve viewed those pictures, I feel like I’ve partaken of a forbidden fruit. The physical contents of one’s head are far from beautiful, to say the least.

And now I will close with more photos from this morning’s walk:

Fall Photo Walk, October 22

As I mentioned in my preview for this post, I took more than 300 photos during this morning’s photo walk. Lots of these shots were second takes of favorable scenes. I’m in the habit of taking multiple shots of the same things in the event the first shot is blurry, underexposed, etc. With that aside, I still had a hard time choosing which shots to post today because I like so many of them. This is certainly a better scenario than coming home to discover that very few of the images prove to be pleasing to the eye. Does anyone else suffer from the occasional “bad hair day” of photography? In all honesty, sometimes this happens to me more often than not.

We’ve had plenty of direct sunlight today, and this bumped up the saturation of fall color a bit compared to yesterday when the light was a bit more elusive.

I can only hope we have a couple more sunny weekends favorable for fall photo walks.

Preview of Today’s Photo Walk

I did another fall photo walk this morning, and this one had a greater density of the sights seen during more typical leaf seasons. I anticipate that I will take a while to decide which of the 300+ images will make the cut for a full photo walk post, so I thought I’d share one of my favorites now.

Layered

I don’t like taking pictures with my phone. Compared to the clarity I enjoy with my DSLR cameras, my phone’s lens seems a distant last resort. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve tried my best to see its limitations as an opportunity for growth. The capacity to compose a good picture and to capture unexpected moments is essential to photography. There is no reason why I can’t accomplish those two goals with my phone camera.

Last weekend I took this picture while gazing up at the canopy of a forest dominated with sugar maples:

Had I used my DSLR, I doubt I would have opted for a wide angle that showed all the layers of change in this little patch of forest. There would have been little green in my telephoto shot. In using my phone, I could only opt for the wide angle, which proved to be the best vantage point in this scene.

Layered