When I woke up this morning, I was planning to go for another fall drive on the hunt for more fall colours. I was counting on the cloudy skies as per the forecast but to my dismay there was a clear blue sky when I got out of bed. At least that was until the fog started rolling in :-). So I jumped in the car as soon as my son was off to school and started driving.

As is usually the case when I get in the car with my camera and start driving, I had no idea where I was going other than to the north since that’s where the colours are changing right now. I really like to just take it by ear and see where the roads lead me. Given that I’m so horribly directionally challenged it’s not hard for me to get lost or turned around, and in this case that’s exactly how I like it. Once I’m done, if I’m still lost I pull out the GPS and tell it to find me a way home.

So today found me wandering aimlessly looking for fall colours in the fog, which I actually thought might work. But the fog was so thick I couldn’t even see the trees on the side of the road! Trying not get discouraged, I kept driving and eventually the fog dissipated and by that time I had also run into an area with some very nice colours happening.

The first place I saw was on the shore of this river, where I spent way too much time getting lost in taking pictures. By the time I decided to move on, the overcast sky was starting to break up, so I hit the road again to see what else I could find. On a whim, I took a dirt side road and came across the scene in the first picture at the top of this blog. That photo is a panoramic image made of 10 images that I shot and stitched in Photoshop. There was just no other way to capture that whole scene. I kept driving down this road to the end and ran across a couple of other scenes which have real potential in a few more days as the leaves change more, so I’ll be going back for sure!

The fall colours also tend to bring out my more abstract side, so I threw my camera into shutter priority mode and played with some slow shutter speeds today as well. I absolutely love the contrast of the white birch trees against the colourful leaves. Plus it’s a fun exercise to see what kind of interesting images you can come up with in camera using different settings.