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Magic of the Fall

Posted by
Darkelf Photography (Perth, Australia) on 14 January 2022 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

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For today's photo I wanted to revisit the magical autumn world of the Swiss Alps near Zermatt. Looking back at the entire trip in 2019, I think that was my favourite day of photography from all the places we visited. I have written before about this special day in my previous photos - Golden Season and Time of Change. There is not really too much to add to my description and photographic process here. I followed much the same steps and basically just took the views in as we were hiking and looked for any possible compositions that stood out.

One thing of interest may be the change in light noticeable through these photos. Golden Season was the one taken the earliest and there was still a lot of sunlight shining through the clouds, which gave the trees a lovely bright glow. As we progressed through the day, that light kept fading very gradually, as more clouds drifted in, and Time of Change and today's photos show that glow disappearing ever so slightly. There was still lovely soft diffused light remaining but the luminescence of the foliage was less pronounced and it became a little bit darker.

The benefit of the changing conditions was that the light was becoming fairly uniform across the scene and I was able to avoid harsh highlights, especially in the clouds and in the snow capped mountains. I still used a soft graduated neutral density filter to control the top part of the image. This allowed me to photograph the full scene in one frame rather than requiring blending of exposures in post processing. This is my preferred way of photographing landscapes, where possible obviously. I still take multiple exposures, just to cover myself in case the dynamic range being too great and needing to recover any shadows or highlights later.

Whether one uses filters in the field or whether one prefers to blend exposures, it all comes down to everyone's personal artistic vision and style when out in the field or in front of a computer. Some may choose not to process photos at all and that is completely fine too. I hope that my description of the process I follow and my experiences give you at least one perspective on how to achieve your vision in photography.

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV 1/30 second F/8.0 ISO 100 35 mm

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Natural Splendor by Steven