Clipstone Forest Revisited (November 2018)

At the moment I feel like I am in some sort of posting time warp where I can't seem to get to the end of November 2018's autumn photographs! I could, of course, move on to more current subjects but this would consign lots of images either to the depths of the hard drive or to that floating place away in the cloud....

I have always aimed to make this blog comprehensive, covering the full timeline of my photography activities. I also feel that my photography has improved because of the blogging process and I have certainly gain more satisfaction from organising my photography in this format. The only embarrassment is the constant, typos, missing words, wrong words, errant punctuation, and clumsy writing. I never suspected that writing a few paragraphs to support some photos would be so difficult at times! That said, I enjoy the reference library that the blog provides particularly having found a way to convert the posts to a PDF book.

So, with all that mind, I will press on with the November 2018 posts which sees me back in Clipstone Forest only a matter of days after the last visit - or what seems like months in blog time! After a few test shots on my normal route around the forest, I could see that the colours had peaked and the leaves had started to fall in numbers. That said, there was enough colour to keep the photography interesting particularly looking up to the tree tops where the light and colour was very strong:

The image below shows the context for the above tree tops compositions and it demonstrates the need to get right underneath the trees for the best shots. The more conventional point of view is not as effective or as visually striking:

I applied a similar approach to some oak and beech trees:

 Yet again, I have more images than will comfortably fit into one post so I will complete this one with some shots of beech trees and leave the rest for a 'part 2' post:

Farnsfield Trees in Autumn - Part 2

As stated in my previous post, part 2 of Farnsfield Trees in autumn will concentrate on photographs of the oak trees in and around the village of Farnsfield in Nottinghamshire. These are part of my wider doorstep photography project which aims to capture the local environment including only venues that I can walk to from home.

I want to show that landscape photography is not necessarily an activity that requires car journeys, often at the extreme ends of the day, to the more established photography locations - as I once did regularly. Local photography can be just as enjoyable and engaging, if not more so. There is calmness to walking and taking photographs with a mindful satisfaction gained from observing the subtle changes in my surroundings on a day-to-day basis. This includes subjects like the oak trees around the village.

By mid-November the oak tree leaves have dried to a dull rusty brown colour and individually they are not too inspiring to look at. However, when they collectively catch the sun they light up spectacularly. The best time for this is sunset when the low light turns the tops of the trees a deep auburn colour:

At other times of the day the brighter sunlight reflects some vibrant oranges which may be better described as ginger. Either way, it is an uplifting colour when set against blue skies:

Farnsfield Trees in Autumn

In December, I posted some early autumn photographs of trees in, and around, the village of Farnsfield, Nottinghamshire. I also stated in the post that I had revisited these trees on several occasions capturing the autumn colours as they developed and eventually died away.

The regular revisits are necessary as each type of tree colours and sheds their leaves at different times during the season. For example, the common lime is one of the earliest to lose its leaves and by the end of first week in November the limes are mostly bare and ready for winter.

I took these lime tree images in the last week of October. There were still leaves on the tree but much of the autumn colour was disguised by the low afternoon sunlight - turning lime to orange!

The leaf colour is easier to see in these close-up images:

Just over a week later I returned to find that most of the leaves had fallen. On this occasion though I photographed a different common lime tree on the same path:

In the December post I eulogised about one particular tree on the edge of the village which I have often thought might be a common lime. I can't get close enough to confirm the identity but the fact that it lost it leaves at the same time as the other lime trees in the area suggests it could be a lime (I can rule out it being an ash by zooming into the leaf shape on the PC). Either way, it looks very different one month on from my early October photograph:

In my next post, I will cover more of the Farnsfield trees concentrating mainly on the oak trees, one of the last trees to colour and lose their leaves in autumn.

Autumn, Sherwood Forest - Part 4 (November 2018)

Having divided the previous posts in this series into trees types, beech, birch and oak, I now have some remaining photographs that didn't fit into any of the categories which I will now show in this final selection from Sherwood Forest in November 2018.

As I walked around Sherwood I captured pictures of the forest paths picking out the scenes that were particularly colourful:

I spotted this larch tree with some vibrant colour :

In recent posts, I have included images looking up to the tops of the trees where the light is brightest and the colours stand out against the perfect blue skies:

I often pass this field of wild grass on the way back to the car and it which always catches my photographic eye. On this occasion I particularly liked the soft tones of the grass set against the autumn trees although I had lost most of the sunlight by the time I reached the field:

Finally, I picked out some of the autumn colours in the plantation that screens the site of Thoresby Colliery (now closed). In fact, I think the hill in the photograph below might be a reclaimed slag heap although I am not totally sure: