Autumn Colours on a Grey Day

Autumn Colours on a Grey Day

Yet another grey overcast Sunday morning. It is the time of year when it barely seems to get light, and doesn't inspire one to go out, let alone take photographs. Fishermen used to call conditions like this sprat weather, in the mistaken belief, it was the best time to catch sprats.




I originally intended that I would write an entry every week. But I have rather missed that target over the last three weeks, partly due to other commitments. But, also, like all the best bad workmen, I will blame my tools. My Olympus is still out for repair (six weeks and counting), so I am left using my Panasonic TZ70. Now the TZ70 is very good in bright conditions, but really struggles in the murky, overcast, grey, low light, which has been the norm for the last couple of weeks.

As an example, my lead image of Lode Mill is definitely not straight out of camera. The SOOC jpg is shown below. It took a lot of work in RawTherapee to produce the image at the top of this entry. This was not a view of the mill that I had noticed before, but now realise, that in spring and summer the poplar trees at the front of the mill would be in leaf and hide the mill from view. As it is, I think the bare branches give the illusion of a building cocooned in the woodland.




One of the features of RawTherapee is that there always more than one way to achieve anything. This can be confusing for someone just starting to use it, particularly, since documentation is not the strongest feature of the application. But, it can be interesting to compare results. For the image at the top of this entry, I used the haze removal function. For the image below, I did not, but tweaked various other adjustments. The difference is small, and by and large the colours look the same, but with haze removal, the trees in front of the mill, and the detail on the white boarding on the mill, stand out more.




Looking through the other photographs I took on Sunday, it is very noticeable that those taken at the longer focal length, like the picture of Lode Mill, are very much duller than those taken at a wide angle. So I will restrict this entry to just three others which were acceptable without any further processing.



The leaves on the oaks have turned a rather beautiful copper colour which more than rivalled the surrounding beech trees. I did take some shots of the beech, but they suffered from the general dullness that affected the picture of the mill. As this blog is about getting good results out of camera, I have left them out of this entry.



I think there are some unsung heroes of the autumn. For instance, some bramble leaves turn a lovely deep red. I noticed yesterday, that the reed beds had turned a light copper colour, giving an attractive edge to the ditches. There is almost an infinite ways of framing a shot of massed vegetation like this, and I invariably walk away thinking that I did not get the best one.



Finally, I found this tree framed by yellow leaves rather attractive.

Tags: Autumn colours Lode mill