Autumn is like Christmas Day for a month if you are in any way interested in Outdoor Photography. As Summer fades and we start looking out the big wooly jumpers we know were going to need before long, we also look out the window at every tree we pass; watching, analysing, trying to imagine when each mighty Oak or Ash will reach ‘peak’.
That fleeting time when a leaf has lost or converted as much chlorpophyll as possible, betacarotene-esque compounds are at thier maximum levels bringing red and yellow tones with them but the process whilst being violently rapid in terms of a trees timescale has not yet been so traumatic that the tree has excised the leaf to stop the pain.
When the season is well into itself, you’ll find landscape photographers in all sorts of wierd places as they seek that composition full to bursting with those rich and warming Autumn Tones.
A kind friend, sympathetic to the aesthetic arts led me to the fairly well hidden Carndaisy Glen deep in central Ulster.
Following the path whilst my eye was led astray with first one, then another leaf falling, spinning downwards to rest over winter on the ground before feeding the fungi and beetles in spring to give back to the parent carbon and precious nourishment. Either that or fall to the stream to be carried towards the far ocean, first meandering then rushing, then swirling, endlessly, almost an infinte journey for each wee leaf, as it’s abductor, the stream, takes it’s leisurely looping course through field and bog, Atlantic Bound.
At once I was moved by how all things are on a Journey, that’s one of the things we definitely do all share, that Journey from our beginning to our end.