Altweibersommer has struck the North Country, with warm afternoons reaching shirtsleeves weather and the Sun bakes the linear forms of railroad tracks and dry branches. A local man walks his dog by the modern metal forms of feed silos.
Tag: fall
Guest Post: Blue Ridge Landscape
Today’s post comes courtesy of @STEMFemme from our recent hike on the Grayson Highlands section of the Appalachian trail!
Wild Ponies!
To keep the Grayson Highlands bald a herd of “wild” ponies is allowed to roam to keep the vegetation in check. The ponies are feral, but they’re not really shy around humans.
This particular pony was pretty popular!
Glowing Garage
Fall in the North Country makes dramatic skies and shadows. What I’ll call “drivewayhenge” aligned the sun precisely with this driveway, allowing for much of the scene to be in shadow while the garage at the end is a glowing beacon. In typical North Country fashion, that garage is a Millenium Falcon of useful modifications.
Fall in the Enchanted Forest
St. Lawrence University’s Enchanted Forest has a tree planted by each graduating class (though they’ve run out of space!), and amongst the bright yellow leaves and the gnarled bark is Herring-Cole Hall (they say it’s haunted!). The narrow depth of field (I was photographing a wedding!) completes the 3-D feel of standing between the trees.
Fall Flight
Procrastinating a proposal is a great time for a quick drone flight. Though the camera quality is still around “potato,” the sight of St. Lawrence’s campus as autumn colors seep in, with foothills in the background, was too good to pass up.
If you’d like to watch the full flight (complete with overly trippy guitar music in place of screaming drone prop noise), I uploaded it to YouTube. The need for a gimbal on the camera is evident.
The Alps
One of the good things I can say about grad school is that it gave me the opportunity to travel to and see places that I never would have otherwise, like the Austrian Alps. The Alps really are quite spectacular and there’s nothing quite like flying into Innsbruck.
Cloudbreak
On a day much like today, ready for rain but without any guarantees, a hint of blue sky is an eyeball magnet.
Autumn Is Winter
Late fall doesn’t mean rich, verdant scenes or flame-colored leaves. In the North Country, late fall really means early winter. The fields are brown, the trees are bare, and the scene is dusted with snow. Other than the greens of the pines, the world hibernates. The birds scattering to the air are the only signs of life, but the scene has a sort of cliché, stark beauty.
Fallfire
When red leaves are backlit, they seem to glow so unbelievably. HDR photography can turn this setting from charming to almost overwhelming.
Kayaks in Autumn II
In the past week, I’ve explored the Adirondacks in autumn. This particular setting (just across the street from last week’s sea plane) is another irreducible representation of the glassy water, expansive sky, and intimate beaches of the region. Though we’re officially into fall, I’m pretty confident that these canoes and kayaks are going to see at least a few more weeks’ use. (Will they be dodging icebergs eventually?)
Kayaks in Autumn I
Ready to launch those kayaks and disturb the chilly mirror of a fall river in the Adirondacks? Me, neither. (Too cold and too placid.)
Berkeley Still Life
Berkeley is a pretty surreal place; as I process that, I thought my 400th post on Decaseconds might be a great time to really show it. The yellows of the birch tree are so sharp on a foggy fall morning, amid the hard, stained concrete of the past and the high-tech Li Ka Shing Building (one of my first-ever posts) materials. Visual contrast, both literal and metaphorical, align with the conceptual contrast of a place that prides itself on being countercultural while also being the birthplace of many of the technologies and ideas that make our modern culture possible.
Under the bridge
This one’s a little different, here I was playing around with a pinhole on my Canon T3i. This is actually a manually measured 3 shot HDR pinhole photo of a bridge on Cal’s campus. Composing this shot was a bit of a challenge as really the only way to judge composition is to take a long exposure (in this case not that long with the help of very high ISO settings). Processing it was also a bit of a challenge as the amount of change in the lighting over the duration of the three exposures created really weird looking highlights. Still, the peculiar kind of “lo-fi” quality is neat, and I’ve been experimenting with landscapes where the reduction in detail is less noticeable.
Foothills
Where earth meets sky at the edge of the horizon, the foothills of the Adirondacks oscillate under the autumn colors and I use increasingly baroque adjectives to describe the North Country.
Decaseconds 