I don't know about the rest of the US, but here in northeast OK fall seems to be here early. Our trees are already changing color! I think it is partly because of how dry it has been and partly because of how cold it got recently (mid 40's at night several days!).
While the suggestions in this blog are geared towards fall time photography, many of them will apply to other types of photography as well.
Colorful Leaves
The bright colors of autumn leaves can actually be hard to capture accurately in pictures. The two main things that I usually find happen are that the leaves either are much duller than they look in real life, or they are too blue/green.
There are a few things you can do to fix these problems. The blue/green color problem can be fixed in two ways, if your camera has the option to adjust the white balance (temperature) then you can move it more to the warm (red/orange) side until the colors of the leaves are more accurate.
If your camera doesn't have this option, you can adjust the white balance on your computer after the picture has been taken. For this type of editing, you can just use the basic editing that most iPhones and computers already have.
On phones you just hit edit and find either color balance, warmth, white balance, or temperature, (it is sometimes referred to by different names) and on computers (at least on Windows) you should just be able to do the same thing (the keyboard shortcut on Windows is CTRL +E).
The trick to getting bright colors is all about lighting, try to take your pictures in the morning and evening, or on cloudy days. The lighting you get on rainy days can be some of the best, but it can also be too dark.
If it is so bright out that you feel like you need sunglasses, it is probably way too bright to be taking pictures. When it is too bright there is usually too much of a contrast between dark and light areas to get good pictures of leaves.
One way to get the bright colors to show up well on a sunny day is to have the sun shining from behind them (backlighting). When the sun is shining on the leaves from the front the color usually appears very flat.
On cloudy days with the right brightness the leaves can seem to be glowing, but don't take all your fall pictures on cloudy days or it can start to feel like the sun never shines in the fall where you are!
Animals
Trying to get pictures of animals against the fall leaves can be very, very hard! Not only do they usually not stay or go where you want them to but unless you only want to take pictures of adult horses or cows, most animals are too short to get the leaves as the background.
The only thing you can really do to fix this is to raise the animal up or move the animal far enough away that you can get the leaves in the background. For animals that will climb, or that you can lift you can try putting them up on something.
And although you will still have to move them away from the trees it won't be as far as if they were on the ground.
Another option (if you have hills in the right place) is to get the animals somewhere on a hill where the trees will be in the background. This can work well for larger animals that you can't get up on anything else.
You can also try bringing the leaves down to the animal's level by either literally bending a low hanging branch down or putting them in fallen leaves. This will only really work for smaller animals, and if you can do it in such a way that it doesn't look strange.
Leaf Covered Ground
In general, if you are trying to take a picture of a lot of little things in a big area, a field of flowers, or the ground covered in fall leaves for example, it looks better if you take a close up of a few of the objects (or even one) with more in the background rather than focusing on the whole scene.
This is because when we see the ground covered in leaves our minds know what those things look like up close, but when you see it all condensed on a screen you see it as just a bunch of little objects without any detail, and it doesn't usually look very good.
Comments