I have not done much this autumn, stayed mostly home, reading up a lot and occasionally making small progress with my various fine arts photography projects. The fall-foliage in American mid-south has been scarce this year as well, so instead to trying to find locations, I took my favorite drives around the backroads of Tennessee.
The day was cloudy but the colors were also rare around Memphis. There were patches of color and I ended up doing my favorite impressionistic images of the foliage again. The process is very simple and almost fail-proof.
- Details on how to do these creative impressionistic art are on Creative Garden & Backyard Photography ebook
- More Abstract photography
- Get Abstract Nature Prints
I decided not to go for the usual, straight shots of these trees. Even if I did, it would not have been like the fall foliage you would see in New Hampshire or any of the other places in the East Coast. The colors were not too bright, they were patchy and almost appeared dull, even though there was moisture in the air. So I decided to go for my favorite style, impressionism.
After driving around a bit, I found a beautiful stretch of backroad with some beautiful fall foliage. Mostly sugar maple, red oak and birch. While birches would have been a great choice for these impressions, they were few in numbers and too thinly spread to have some great composition.
Almost all the techniques mentioned in the Creative Impressionistic Photography ebook, including camera movement, multiple exposures & others but the one thing I did in almost all of these was to use a manual focus and not focus on anything particular at all, rendering the composition mostly unsharp and bokeh’ed by default.
When shooting digital, especially RAW, the captured image will have all the data but not the look and feel of a JPEG. I use CaptureOne for processing and I would usually increase the saturation, sharpness, dehaze and contrast to boost the colors to the desired shades.
Feel free to experiment, especially with the compositions and camera movements. In a few of these pictures, I had the sun come out from behind the clouds for a short time, lighting up the foreground grass and the wild flowers. In the bright sun, they were over exposed and with the camera movements and multiple exposures, it produced shiny streaks and bright spots in the foreground, producing a very nice effect.