A Little Pond in New Hampshire

/

Little Pond. Sandwich, New Hampshire. October 2024.
Nikon Z8ย withย Nikkor Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR Sย at 120mm, 1/6 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64.

I recently had the opportunity to spend an October dayโ€”an entire dayโ€”photographing in New Hampshire. If I had to live the same month over and over again, Groundhog Day style, I would hope for October because it is pretty much the best month everywhere. (Except Arizona. There it is February.) Certainly in New England, October is the stuff of legends and I had never seen it.

That said, since I was in southern New Hampshire, my visit was about a week early relative to peak color, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of color to be seen. Also, I drove halfway to Canada and there was more and more color as I went. The images in this post were all taken in the morning by Little Pond in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Weather-wise, it had been pouring rain most of the morning as I drove north and it was still raining through this stop on my journey.

There were three consequences to the rain. Firstโ€”and this persisted all day even after the rainโ€”the overcast sky was very bright, so while this illuminated everything with a soft light (Good!) I had to make sure that I had little or no sky in the frame (Annoying!). That is one of the reasons I gravitated to my long zoom and its tighter crop of the scene. Second, shooting at any distance across the lake resulted in a gauzy, low-contrast image. Third, everything was wet, so colors were very vivid on things that were not far away.

The single image above shows this contrast between the vivid colors of the trees on the left with the more muted colors of the trees on the far shore. I really like this image. When I look at it, my eye always initially goes to the yellow tree on the far bank on the right before it drifts over to the nearer orange tree on the left. That closer tree is much crisper due to the atmospherics and is really the subject. I am unsure whether the background tree is too distracting or is what makes the image work. I could tone down the color of that tree, but am loathe to do so.

This next image is a tighter crop of the far shore and, as a result, everything is muted and misty. It is not hard in Lightroom to increase the contrast and boost the colors (The dehaze slider works well for this.) but I decided to leave it alone despite the fact that I generally prefer contrasty images with some real blacks. I did play with changing it, but then it looks like it wasn’t raining at all and loses the atmosphere.

New Hampshire Downpour. Sandwich, New Hampshire. October 2024.
Nikon Z8ย withย Nikkor Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR Sย at 210mm, 1/3 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64.

I didn’t make any adjustments to this next image, either, despite the fact that the foreground tree looks so vivid. This is really just a function of distanceโ€”there is a lot a water in the air but it is too close to the camera for it to have much effect. Also, the fact that the background is so muted by the intervening rain makes the foreground tree seem much sharper and vivider (an awkward-sounding, but real, word) by comparison.

Autumn Rain. Sandwich, New Hampshire. October 2024.
Nikon Z8ย withย Nikkor Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR Sย at 115mm, 1/15 sec, f/9.5, ISO 500.

I decided to give this next image a little boost in contrast and color, I admit, but really it just offsets some of the effect of the rain. The rain had lightened up a bit and it was sort in a middle ground: it wasn’t muted enough to look good and wasn’t vivid enough to look good, either. So, I had to either add some haze or take some away; I opted to take it away. Compositionally, I really like the lichen-covered fallen tree and the reflections on the lake, especially the way they are symmetric, but more impressionistic due to the blurring. The colors are nice, and the lily-pads floating in the lower right are a nice break to the pattern.

Fallen. Sandwich, New Hampshire. October 2024.
Nikon Z8ย withย Nikkor Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR Sย at 400mm, 0.7 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64.

These last two images were both taken at closer range, so they look much more vivid. The way these white tree trunks interweave caught my eye against the dark greens. Obviously, there is a lot more color change still to happen here, but the reds and yellows near the bottom are nice accents to the overall image.

Woven. Sandwich, New Hampshire. October 2024.
Nikon Z8ย withย Nikkor Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR Sย at 130mm, 1/8 sec, f/9.5, ISO 500.

I also like the band of lichen-covered trunks in the center of this next image and the variety of colors in the leaves. Again, peak color wasn’t here yet, but the mix of greens, yellows, oranges, and reds is also nice. It’s a peaceful image, not an in-your-face one.

Stripes. Sandwich, New Hampshire. October 2024.
Nikon Z8ย withย Nikkor Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR Sย at 180mm, 1/15 sec, f/9.5, ISO 500.

I hope that you enjoyed this glimpse into early fall in New Hampshire. I will probably do two more posts about this trip, so there is more to come! Thank you for visiting!

If you subscribe to this blog, thank you! Don’t forget to check out the home page every so often, because I do change the image that is featured there every few weeks.

If you would like to receive my weekly post as an email, please subscribe:

Categories:

Tags:


4 responses to “A Little Pond in New Hampshire”

  1. Having just returned from a trip to Slovenia that included two days of very misty conditions, I am about to experience similar dilemmas in terms of use or otherwise of the Dehaze option!

    I feel your decisions in relation to both of the initial images were very sound. I like the first especially (even if I might have been tempted to crop out a little more of the foreground). Fallen, too, works exactly as you say. Autumn/The Fall is a great season to be out and about.

    • Thank you, Rob! I look forward to seeing your Slovenia imagesโ€”be sure to let me know when they have been released into the wild. I do love the fall; October is universally wonderful. The rain and mist and fog largely settled down after the morning but I just noticed in my catalog that it was back towards the end of the day, too, so I will have to make similar decisions again!

      All that atmosphere does make for a peaceful image, to be sure.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.