One Autumn Morning

5 photographs, 694 words, 4-minute read

Yesterday, I was up before 7am and out the door by 7:10, to be at one of my favourites locations for photography. Favourite, because it’s close and it’s diverse: the Arboretum at our local university, the University of Guelph.

I pretty much ignore the manicured lawns and tree collections and head for the natural areas. Someone had the foresight to leave alone two small forests and some meadow areas and they have become treasure troves for wildlife and native species.

I’m sharing these photos for a few reasons.

1. I love autumn, the light, the hues, the smells, and the crisp morning air.
2. I love the fact that sunrise is at a more reasonable hour than summer.
3. I’m enamoured with Tripod HR and it’s ability to extend dynamic range while capturing an 80 MP file..
4. I’m a great believer in presenting photos that celebrate the light and land as they existed at the time of capture. That means, no recipes, no LUTs, no Presets, no filters, no GenAI, no sky swaps. They are not SOOC — far from it. They benefit from photographic processing of raw files using global and local adjustments of exposure, contrast, colour, sharpening and retouching, akin to how I would have worked in the darkroom back in the day, but with so much more subtle control.

For this set, I worked in an area about the size of a football pitch/field about 10 minutes from our house in suburban Guelph, Ontario. It’s a small natural area within the Arboretum, a place I visit and photograph a number of times each year since I went to school there 40 years ago.

All photos were made with an OM-1 v1 on a tripod using Tripod HR w/M.Zuiko 8-25mm/4 PRO lens; ISO 200.

Most frames are made at ƒ11. The one above is at ƒ16 and I’m really on the edge here, as it introduces some diffraction blurring of details. Careful local sharpening was required.

I made some focus-bracketed frames, but the jury is still out on whether they are an improvement. I’m having to skirt the boundaries of making multiple images, as Tripod HR frames and additional frames for focus bracketing, in that any wind, even the slightest breeze will cause blurring in the final image.

Micro Four Thirds (MFT) sensors are often characterised by 35mm-sensor v/bloggers as less-than-capable in the area of Dynamic Range (DR). As you can see, that is clearly not the case. There are a full range of tones from bright sunlight to full shadow.

You will see that exposure compensation was used to ensure highlights were not clipped (e.g. -2 EV, -2⅔ EV). Only the disc of the sun, when visible in the frame, remained clipped, but that’s not a problem. I have Highlight Clipping turned ON in my EVF and on the LCD. This means I only make one frame and nail the correct exposure the first time. No bracketing. I did make some manual HDR exposures of some of these scenes, but found there was no perceptual improvement in the tones, shadows and highlights.

Get out photographing! Get out at dawn. No get out before dawn so that you are on-site for sunrise. It’s not so early at this time of year.

Think about the natural areas close to you: river valleys, meadows, forests. Go for the autumn hues, and go for the light.

Enjoy!

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