Weekly Challenge – Seasonal

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This week’s challenge was “Seasonal”. And once again it has been an interesting learning experience. I just wish I hadn’t lost my house keys along the way.

Seasonal means “of the season”.  Here in Canberra the season is Autumn which leads to thoughts of transition. It also means an increase in the number hot air balloons, but not today. In resignation, I stopped near some brightly coloured trees to see if anything interesting might happen.

As a plug for these weekly challenges, without deliberately trying, I see a convergence of recent challenges in this week’s submission.  I see “Delicacy”, “Line” and “Sunlight” all making their own contribution.

But mostly I see transition, represented by the semi-transparent leaves and the lost edges of the support branches.

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On the technical front, I took the telephoto lens because I assumed hot air balloons would be off in the distance. Plus, I’d remembered the recent dPS post about telephotos and landscape and thought I’d give it a try. There is something more satisfying about the results, but there was also the frustration of missing shots. Perhaps it’s time to start lugging the bag around like pros do.

My camera is set to take both RAW and large JPEG. Thankfully, I found the RAW option   because I was very disappointed in my digital SLR when I first purchased it. I grew up with the rich colour and detail of photographic slides as the norm. RAW reminds me of that. Plus it means that I can severely crop a RAW image and still keep something useful (ie not pixelated).

Today’s Flame Leaves images were cropped from the RAW .CR2 file. I kept tightening the crop until, finally, the featured image at the beginning of this post jumped out at me. I adjusted the colour slightly because it was a bit too washed out.

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Before the morning was done, I came across this scene. It’s a contrast to the traditional autumn colours. Canberra is a very foggy city this time of year. Yes, this is a “city” scene; there are suburbs on either side of this paddock.  There was a bit of dust around, possibly wafting across from an nearby industrial area, resulting in the slight pink/yellow hue to the mist.

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Related posts
I’ve previously pondered transitions. No photos, but if you’re a little intrigued about the development of ideas that underpins some of my photography, it might be worth a read.