Fall Colors

It has been a long time since I focused on landscape and nature photography. But fall colors always seem to beg for it for a couple of weeks or so. So here are a few images from the past few weeks–a few from the air and a bunch from the ground.

John Muir is famous for saying, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” And a lot more good stuff like that.

• “Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.”
• “And into the woods I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”
• “Come to the woods; for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.”
• “Keep close to Nature’s heart . . . and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

Good sentiments, all. And indeed, I find something of that while walking and photographing. And yet, the photographer in me can lose track of nature itself, oddly, as I look for tones and hues and lines and shapes and patterns. In any case, first, a few from the air.

These are near where I live. The trees and open areas have an abstract expressionist quality, especially if you catch them with some of the leaves down, revealing bare spaces with different textures, colors, and lines and curves.

And a bunch from the ground. These were all taken at the Calvin University nature preserve. These images are pretty standard nature/landscape. Not my normal thing, but fun.

The first one is one of those scenes that Muir so loved and often called “Nature’s cathedrals,” this one made of trees rather than hewn of stone. The one that follows is much more prosaic, but lovely in its own way.

I love “mirror” scenes, whether in nature or windows in towns and cities.

I tried to capture the light in the next one but couldn’t quite pull it off. You can see what I was after, however. The one that follows has a nice glow to it. And, finally, the cardinal. I’m not a bird person. But this one offered a nice splash of red to contrast with the warm yellows and greens in the rest of the image.

The colors are fading, the leaves falling. Muir would probably say is preparing to sleep, along with many of the animals, while many of the birds will go to warmer places for a few months, not unlike some retired folk in the region.