PHOTOGRAPHING AUTUMN

Autumn. Warm jumpers, hot chocolate, log fires and great photography. Why do I love autumn so much and what are my tips for photography during this season? Well, keep reading and I will tell you.

For me personally, summer is the worst time of year for photography. You’ve got the extremely early mornings, harsh sunlight and the coast is so busy! So, for me I love the autumn months as everything just springs to life with colour, and on a personal note I can leave the comfort of my bed a little bit later.

Autumn is full of colour as the fresh green leaves of summer slowly fade way. As there is less sun, the leaves find it harder to feed as the temperature and the chlorophyll within the leaves drops. This in turn changes the leaves a different colour as the leaf start to, well, die. But what a sight it is to see a sea of yellows, oranges, browns and reds.

So here are my tips for autumn landscape photography:

Explore

Seems a pretty simple thing to do, but you will be surprised how many people don’t do it. EXPLORE. I actually include myself into this, as its so easy to be sucked into the popular “honeypot” locations where you know that you will be able to get a shot. Try to get yourself out of that habit, think outside of the box and explore your local area. There is nothing more fulfilling than discovering something new that hasn’t been shot before. You are creating something unique, something special to you that hasn’t been shot thousands times in the past. What I tend to do is use flickr, google images and 500px to research. The internet is a wonderful place and you can find inspiration almost everywhere on it. Look at OS maps for local woodlands and then do a google search. You might find a snapshot to see what the area is like, and if it looks like it might have potential, go and explore.

Look Down

Landscape photography or photography in general isn’t just about the big vistas and the obvious shot. Look down, stop, take a moment and really take in your surroundings. Leaves on the floor, mushrooms, cobwebs covered in morning dew. These are all things that you might miss and simply walk past if you’re looking for the bigger shot. I find mushrooms and leaves a fascinating subject, but there is so much out there. With 15,000 species of mushroom and fungi in the UK alone, their should always be something interesting to find and shoot.

Best time to shoot?

While autumn lasts for a few months, the best of the autumnal colours only generally last for a few weeks. The best autumn colours tend to be around the last weeks of October, leading into the first week of November. Of course this may vary. If we have a hotter prolonged summer, autumn colours may come out slightly earlier, and the opposite happens if its been a bit wetter.

I will take a drive to some of the places I have pinpointed for potential locations around mid October, just to see what is happening. You will soon start to see when the leaves are turning and you will be able to plan your shoots from there. If you see some decent colour, I suggest shooting it. It only takes a day of strong winds to destroy that colour / composition for a whole year. The environment this time of year changes rapidly. Although you can get great shoots on overcast days, especially if you’re involving rivers and water, if you’re shooting woodland and trees my advice would be to look out for mist or shoot at sunrise or sunset. First of all, mist really helps to separate trees in an otherwise busy and hectic scene. Sunrise and sunset provides a soft side lighting and contrast within your image, otherwise you are in danger of your final image looking a bit flat and “busy”.

Use a polariser

Using a polariser is really beneficial when it comes to photographing woodland and forest scenes. The polariser will enhance the colour of the foliage and really make it pop. If it’s been raining, or you also have water in your composition, the polarising filter will take any glare away to make it a cleaner imagine and eradicate any strong highlights caused by the water. It really is my favourite filter and I would highly recommend EVERY landscape photographer to have one. I use a polariser made by Lee Filters which I absolutely love.

Overall, nothing beats a good landscape photography shoot during the autumn months, so just get out there, be creative and explore. Remember, in photography their really isn’t any right or wrong. Shoot what catches YOUR eye. I’m lucky that I’m a landscape photographer who is based in the picturesque county of Dorset, but you can find beauty, colour and autumnal scenes anywhere if you look hard enough.

Happy shooting

Tim Monaghan