Autumn’s Colours

Last week I tried to to photograph Autumn’s typical colours but without too much success, so I decided to try a local wood with plenty of deciduous trees. The day was forecast sunny and so I arrived early to get the best of the early morning ‘golden hour’ light, but had to wait a while for the sun to rise.   As I sat in the gloom, one of the local occupants decided to check me out – a male Roe Deer, who kept coming up to a couple of hundred metres, looking at me intently, then running back barking, stopping, coming back again then repeating the whole thing again, doing this about four different times.  Eventually he left continuing to bark, where I could hear him in the distance for a further 20 minutes.  Unfortunately I only had a 300 lens and it was still dark – the picture below not really showing how dark – as the sun was only now just hitting the top of the trees.  Taken at 1/40th 3200 ISO.

	Roe Deer Alarm call

With the sun only hitting the tree tops within the woods, I had a look at the lake where the light was creating a lovely warm colour on the far side. I had the wrong lens to photograph wildlife but did managed to capture an image of an adult swan with some of its youngsters. The various other waterfowl would have made great pictures had I had my 500 lens as the light was perfect, but I hadn’t planned on any wildlife photography today, wanting to instead travel light.

Returning to the woods, the sun had momentarily disappeared making the wood seem very dull. When it did reappear, it was only to light up the tops of the trees, so I spent much of my time with my camera pointing upwards. One of the things I like to try and do with my photography, particularly landscape and scenery, is to capture just what I see, the colours the mood, atmosphere, unfortunately today I failed miserably.

Some three hours after sun up its warm early morning glow was replaced by a much harsher light, though still the rays were only in places, hitting the floor of the wood due to the suns lower place in the sky at this time of year. Quite a bit of bird activity today, probably making the most of the last of the available summer food with still some insects about as well as berries and acorns. Only two further sightings of Roe Deer, though with the unavoidable noise made by the thick leaf litter on the ground, they could probably hear me coming some way off.