On the one day with no rain, I made my first visit of the season to the gardens. I was hoping for more blooms, but it seems I was 7-10 days early for that. If we get some sunny days, things will explode with color.
I started out thinking I would use primarily my wide-angle lens, but I ended up using every lens in my bag. The blooms were bent over, not straightening up without some sun, so I had to lay on the ground for many of the pictures. With all the rain we’ve had, it was a trick to stay reasonably clean.
But I’m happy with my results.
We’ve had a very wet past few weeks, so not a lot of opportunities to go shooting. What is here is one gorgeous sunset, the first blooms in the garden, one of our rare snowfalls that amounted to anything, and a foggy morning following the snowfall.
Some of us went out to shoot the last sunset of the old year and first sunrise of the new year. We had no clouds or color at all for the sunset, but the sunrise was very good. These pictures were taken at Tidwell Park on Lake Lanier.
Here are the results I like best of those taken this year.
Images from the first half of the month at various places. The first and last are from Dec 6, the Christmas stuff from Dec. 9, the reflections and frog from the quarry on Pine Log Creek from Dec, 11 and the rest from Buford Dam on Dec 15.
A collection of images from various places around north Georgia. We did not have great colorful hillsides, but I did find a number of beautiful places as I wandered about. The color came much later than normal, well into November.
A two-day event. First day was a set of falls in South Carolina and one in North Carolina. Then overnight in Brevard, NC before a few more venues the next day. I was really hoping for better color than we found, but we had a lot of fun anyway.
A trip to St. Paul to see family and watch Gabby skate in a competition.
I was up and out just before sunrise each morning for a walk and couple hours of photography. The first morning was the Ramsey House and Irving Park; the second morning was down along the river below the Wabasha Street Bridge; the third morning was up to the cathedral, over to the capitol and back through downtown to Rice Park. The last morning, I walked across the Wabasha Street bridge, down to Raspberry Island, back up and back through Rice Park again.
A hike with the Hearthstone Hikers on a very nice trail, including a very nice quarry. The sun was high and bright, so the light on the trees and rocks was difficult to expose correctly, but it all worked out alright. 🙂
The first four images are from the full group hike. The final three images are from the scouting hike several days before.
I went alone to explore the section of the trail that had been close due to storm damage earlier this year. The section I really wanted to get to, the boardwalk not far from the fishing pond, is still closed, with a temporary detour to allow access to the rest of the loop.
Besides that, there was no color to speak of. I did see a couple red trees, but there was no useful picture I could find. I did find one red bush (don’t think it is sumac but I may be wrong), so I tried to find a nice composition. Failing that, I fell back on ICM. I tried 6-stop and 10-stop ND filters. The 10-stop filter forced shutter speeds that caused too much blur, at least for my taste.
Then on the way back I found a stand of pine that lent itself to ICM, so I did that too. Along that part of the trail, the woods were dense enough that no filter was needed.