Amy's Leaf

This photograph adequately sums of the frustration of my fall.

I've been waiting and waiting for the explosion of color that we typically have this time of year and I've been disappointed. That's not to say that it hasn't been beautiful, because it has in its own way, but from a photographic standpoint the colors just weren't very vivid. It's almost as if most of the foliage just fell off while it was still green.

Instead of a landscape teeming with bright oranges, reds and yellows I've found myself shooting at a world that only has splashes of color. During a bridal portrait shoot this afternoon that Bethany conducted I was walking along the lake trail at Douthat and noticed that most of the leaves had fallen. Then I noticed that most of the leaves were brown or very dully colored. We stopped at a bench in front of the water fall at the lake and I noticed that of all the leaves at my feet, there was only one that had any real color to it. I stared at it for a long moment and then took the photo without disturbing anything.

Last year we had an abundance of color amid a wet and almost constantly raining autumn. It was great and it eventually led to a heavier than usual winter. This year the colors have been as sparse as the rain and I've found myself searching in different places for the splashes of color that I've been wanting to add to my collection.

But then again, I should be thankful for what color we have in the world. After everything that's happened this week I've gained a little more perspective on life than I once had. I know a girl who would have loved to have been able to see another autumn, but this one was her last. It was the message her mom imparted to me at the family visitation.

"If there's something you want to do in life, Josh, then do it. Don't make excuses not to. Don't put it off. Just do it. That was the only thing Amy regretted, the things she didn't do and won't get to do."

Heavy words that were driven home by the poignancy of the moment. Amy's life was cut short by disease that she fought with everything she had but couldn't beat. She'll never get to finish her degree, have children and do a thousand other things that I'm sure she wanted to do. Perhaps most heartbreakingly, she won't get to grow old with her husband.

When I die I hope that I can do so after a long life lived to its fullest. So as much as I wanted as vivid a fall as last year's, I think I'm just going to appreciate this one and the fact that, most likely and God willing, I'll be able to get up in the morning to enjoy another day with my wife.

So today (I'm writing this as Saturday turns to Sunday) when Bethany has another shoot and I walk along the same trail and see this leaf, I'm going to remember Amy, tell my wife I love her and be thankful for what I have.

I'd like to think that Amy would be happy knowing that I took that away from visiting with her family in the days after her passing.

I still wish the outcome could have been different...

A Little Pick Me Up

I had an interesting, if somewhat vain experience today.

During the trek back down from Roaring Run falls last week I lost a foot off my tripod. It has a screw missing that tightens the clamp that holds the foot and I just keep forgetting to replace the screw. On the other hand, I usually remember to keep up with the feet of my tripod. Last week I didn't, but by fortunate happenstance a member of the camera club went back on the trail just the other day looking for his lost cell phone and came away with my foot.

So I went by the Fire & Light Gallery to retrieve it (where I also picked up a set of nice handmade coat hangers) and decided that I'd stop by the Clifton Forge Public Library on my way home to peruse the shelves. I have a Kindle, as I'm sure I've mentioned on this blog in the past, so going to the library has become a little like shopping in a bookstore for me now. Most stores don't care for the Kindle because it's an Amazon only product. Barnes & Noble has their own e-reader, the Nook, but I like the Kindle better and therefore I can't take the Kindle into a B&N and download books from Amazon and not the B&N online store.

So I go to the store and take notes on what books I want to buy. Or I just go to the library and look around. I was walking down a general fiction aisle at the library and I stumbled across my own two novels setting on the shelf. My novels. My name was on them. And they were on the shelf that was one of my favorites when I was kid, where I found Star Trek and Star Wars novels and later fantasy novels that introduced me to entire new worlds.

And my books were on those same shelves.

It's been a hard week and a long and busy month. I needed that little pick me up and didn't even realize it. I needed to see those books on that shelf and remember why I started writing in the first place.

I'd better be getting back to it.

Blowing My Own Horn

This may be something of a record week for me. Three blog posts and three photographs. Not a bad bit of work if I do say so myself. (And I do. In the words of one Chiefie O'Rourke, if you don't blow your own horn, who will?)

This is the third keeper from my Roaring Run trip and, unlike the others, not something I've shot before. In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that this is the bottom of the cascade in yesterday's blog post. I really enjoy the shape of the water sliding down the rocks. I've never seen a stream move quite like that before. Notice how it sort of swings out, back in and then curves back out again? I think that's pretty neat. I'm also a fan of how the water almost (but not quite) seems to be an afterthought in the photograph. I wish that the sun had made a bigger impression in the photograph, but I think that having it there is a nice touch. Oh, an if you'll look closely in the foliage on the right, I'm fairly certain that's Gavin Dressler standing in my photograph.

In looking at everything I've shot recently I'm discovering that I much prefer to take a vertical photograph as opposed to a horizontal one. I'm not sure why, particularly since most of my photojournalism training involved shooting horizontally as a pretty standard practice and then cropping vertical later in post processing if I wanted to. It definitely lends itself well to shooting streams and waterfalls, so I think I'll keep the habit for now.

I may yet pull out one or two others from Sunday's trip, but these three were definitely the highlights for me. I only took about 20 photographs and I've culled the three I've shown you as the best.  The photograph below was taken by Jeff Bartley (who has an aversion to being in these photographs) who volunteered to take the group photo of everyone that went on the outing. This isn't all the members of the Alleghany Camera Club by far and there were even a couple more people who showed up after the photograph was taken. Chuck Almarez passed this along to everyone after the outing, so I thought I'd post it here.

Then & Now

I've shot quite a bit up at Roaring Run, particularly in autumn, and I always seem to come up with something new. Sometimes I'll even revisit an old favorite and see it in a different light.

This is another one of my keepers from Sunday's Roaring Run trip. I took a photo last year from almost the same position but at a completely different angle. The water was higher last year, taking away a lot of the gentle rolling you see in this image. There was also a great deal more color in the forest then as opposed to now.

The assignment for Sunday was capturing motion and light. Usually I use a really dark Neutral Density filter (about 9 stops worth) and take a three minute or so exposure. I was traveling in a pack Sunday and didn't have a great deal of time to spend on each photo like I normally would. So instead I shot with my 28mm wide angle lens and 50mm macro and closed the lens all the way down, lowered my ISO and used a polarizer to bring out the colors and give me another couple of stops of darkness.

Using the polarizer instead of the other filter gave me an entirely different image of the water. Sure, it wasn't as silky smooth as the others, but look at the image above. The water has a nice blue tint to it (mostly due to the fading light) and a great deal of flowing motion that may have been smoothed over in a longer exposure. I especially love the fact that the water fills up the entire bottom portion of the photograph before flowing to the left and then away from the camera.

Oh, and just for comparison, below you'll find the image I shot around the same time last year. See the difference?