6-minute read (not including photo captions at bottom)

Shenandoah!

Wasn’t there a Broadway musical or something that starts with:

Shenandoah, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain…

Oh, wait – that was Oklahoma, wasn’t it? Hmmm. Yeah, ok, whatever – don’t judge me – I don’t know from musicals.

In any case, in my intro blog post, I promised to start in the middle – which I did in my second post (just to keep you on your toes). Then I promised to return to the present – almost. Since I am a stalwart, man-of-my-word kinda guy, I intend to deliver on that promise by showing you some Fall color photos from a couple of months ago. Well, maybe not exactly Fall color since half the photos are B&W. So, ok, Fall “mood” photos – how’s that?

Shenandoah National Park – with Skyline Drive running along its backbone – is an amazing place, where “the wind comes right behind the rain”. And it’s right in our DC Metro backyard! If you’ve never been, stop what you’re doing and go right now!

In November, 2018, I bought an annual pass for Shenandoah National Park (a real deal at $50/year with unlimited access – considering that a single entry is $30). Since then, I’ve driven along parts of Skyline Drive at least 15 times, and hiked several of the (shorter) trails. On one of those occasions, in September, 2019, I even drove the entire 105.5-mile stretch from the northern Front Royal gate to the southern Rockfish Gap gate (near Waynesboro, VA) in one (admittedly long and slightly grueling) day.

The park is also a great place for astro-photography since it’s open 24/7 (weather permitting) and is among the darkest areas you’ll find anywhere near a major metropolitan area. But more on that later (hint, hint).

Although I got a few Fall foliage shots in 2018, I didn’t get as many as I wanted. So, in 2019 I made the effort to go to Shenandoah several times during the peak leaf-peeping window, which only lasted about a fortnight. All the photos in this set were taken either on Friday, October 25th, or the following Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. On Wednesday the 30th, there was a fair amount of rain and wind in the area, so by the following Saturday (November 1st), when I drove a portion of Skyline with my parents, there was only a hint of color left.

Friday’s weather was nice: low 60’s and partly cloudy, with some interesting cloud formations at higher altitudes (as you can see from the first panorama shot at Big Meadows) – but above all, the weather was pretty uniform along the length of Skyline Drive that I drove.

Tuesday’s weather, on the other hand, was a lot crazier. In the lower parts of the valleys, it was similar to Friday – maybe a bit sunnier – but there was a cloud bank skirting one of the peaks for most of the morning that plunged you into a different world when you drove through it. As you’ll see from the photos and video, driving through that dense cloud layer was a dramatic difference from the rest of the drive. The temperature was about 20 degrees (F) cooler, and the winds were strong enough to buffet the car a few times. The winds cut through the light sweatshirt I was wearing, and the streaming clouds coated the camera lens with fine water droplets after just a few seconds.

I often shoot a timelapse video sequence when I drive to Shenandoah, partly to document the trip for posterity, but also because you never know what you’re going to see. I generally use my Samsung Galaxy S8 phone, mounted to the dash of my car on a plastic clip with a suction cup. Using the phone’s built-in hyperlapse mode, the camera shoots 1 second of video for every 10 seconds of real time. So, one minute of real time would be 6 seconds of video, and so on.

At that video speed, you really get a feel for how the clouds move – and Tuesday was an ideal day for that effect. Check out the video below to see what that looked like. It was just as fascinating to watch the clouds from afar as it was when you were in the middle of them. In the thickest part of the cloud, visibility was down to about 20 or 30 yards – it was really pretty freaky.

The hyperlapse video from Tuesday is below. I cut about 5 minutes from the original for pacing reasons, so if you’d like to see the full “Director’s Cut”, check it out on my YouTube channel.

This series of photos is also a case in point regarding my ongoing education in post-processing, specifically in Adobe’s Lightroom. As I mentioned previously, I started working in Lightroom shortly after the West Coast Road Trip with my brother in June, 2016. Since then, I have watched hundreds of YouTube tutorials, taken several classes, read a couple of books, and spent many hundreds of hours poring through the program, noodling around and experimenting with different settings. Despite this amount of time and effort, I still consider myself an intermediate user, with a lot left to learn. So, if you spot anything I’m doing wrong – or anything I could be doing better – please feel free to leave a comment or email me. I’m always interested in learning how little I know…. : -)

For example, it wasn’t until I started editing these fall photos, that it finally dawned on me that crisp, tack-sharp images may not always be the most desirable (my ICM efforts notwithstanding). At one point, I experimentally turned down the Texture and Clarity sliders in Lightroom while editing a photo, and was stunned by the fuzzy, "painterly" result. What some traditional photographers might consider a post-processing “error” was actually quite attractive to me, so I ran with that, as you’ll see below. Of course, once I was sensitized to this technique, I noticed other photographers mentioning it on YouTube, but very few have taken it to the extreme that I have (by dialing both Texture and Clarity down to the lowest setting of -100). Let me know in the comments if you like the effect or not.

This also led me to experiment more with some of the B&W settings, with some dramatic results, including some of the first attempts I have made to date with “selective color” editing (removing all but one or two colors from an image).

To skip the notes and view the images below without commentary, go to the Gallery page for this post. CLICK HERE, or click on the Gallery link at the top of the page.

Shot on Friday (10/25/19) at Big Meadows, located at roughly the half-way point on the 105-mile length of Skyline Drive. It was a bright, sunny day with some interesting cloud formations that was just begging for a panorama. This is an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image, stitched together in Lightroom from 78 individual frames. HDR means that each piece of the panorama is made up of three "bracketed" frames - one normal exposure, one under-exposed (to better render the bright sky), and one over-exposed (to better render the shadows). So there are essentially 26 separate photos - each one exposed at three different levels - comprising the whole.

Shot on Tuesday (10/29/19) about an hour after sunrise at the Dickey Ridge Welcome Center near the Front Royal gate to the park. This is also an HDR panorama, comprised of 84 bracketed frames, or 28 individual slices.

Shot from Skyline Drive, looking down into the valley (at what I think may be a part of Sperryville). On that day (Friday), some of the trees were as bright red as the barns.

Looking back from one overlook to another on Skyline, a little more than an hour after sunrise.

Looking into the Shenandoah Valley from Skyline Drive. This was processed using what I call my "Painterly Color" settings to create something bordering on the abstract. This series of settings - which I saved as a "preset" in Lightroom for future use - entails dialing down all the sharpness options to their lowest possible levels, while super-saturating all colors to provide depth and "pop" to the image. While this may not be a "traditional" (i.e., crisp, clear) photograph, I like the almost pointillist effect (hence the "painterly" part of the preset name). And keep in mind that, although this is not meant to be a "photo-realistic" depiction of the scene, the colors are all "real" - there are no false, altered, or added colors here, they are simply more saturated than what would be considered "normal" for standard post-processing.

Using the Painterly Color preset again brings this lone "red rebel" out of its not-so-well-concealed hiding place.

Another example of what the Painterly Color preset can do. The colors of the vines, and parts of the rock face, look like a nasty, three-day-old bruise, don’t they?

The Painterly Color preset not only enhances the natural colors, but lends a soft, dreamy aspect to an image. Ironically, I feel like the lack of sharpness actually helps to "inform" the contours of the rock better. Without the distraction of a tack-sharp texture, in which one gets lost between the cracks and crevices, your eye is free to explore the tactile consistency of the rock in a less "visually confined" way. Or maybe I'm just a colossal, "visually misguided" fool. Could go either way.

The Painterly Color preset is subtle in this case, but softens the outlines of the leaves and bark, and adds depth to the image.

This is a "traditionally" processed image - standard sharpening techniques with basic saturation/luminance settings, but I did crop it and re-center, as you can tell from the before-and-after image below.

Triple Thistle Threat….say THAT ten times fast....I knew when I shot this that it would have to be a B&W. I also knew when I processed it that it had to be sharp - other than the naturally out of focus background (aka Bokeh), there was no dialing-down of the texture and clarity here. I wanted those thistle points to hurt. I also cropped the original image to show only three thistle "buds", since I think things look better in threes (in a case like this).

OK, so I went a bit off the rails here.

After looking at hundreds of conventional, colorful images, I got to the point where I felt like I had to not just bend – or even break – some of the standard rules of post-processing. I had to actually dig a hole, throw all the rules in it, and stomp on them to the point where they were rendered unrecognizable as rules. They were "ex-rules" (in Monty Python-speak : -) ). We’re talking “a disaster of biblical proportions....human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together....mass hysteria”! (Ghostbusters, 1984). I won't go into all the techie details of how this was done (email me if you want to know). Suffice it to say I saved this as a preset that I called "B&W X-Ray".

Like so many things, this was the result of an accident. I was playing around with some of the sliders in Lightroom and clicked in the wrong spot. Fortunately, right after I exclaimed "Whoa, WTF?", but right before I clicked Undo to correct my "mistake", I realized that I actually loved what I was looking at, and another "signature preset" was born. My official story will be that this look was the result of many arduous hours of careful and studied manipulation, so anyone reading this has to sign an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) before sharing this image.

Another example of what the B&W X-Ray preset does to a normal photo. This started life as a leafless tree against a bright, partly-cloudy-hazy-blue background. The preset inverted everything, making the tree white against a pitch-black background. Happy Halloween.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here....

This is a slight variation of the B&W X-Ray preset, with a few tweaks. Normally, I would shy away from a "busy" image like this - there's too much detail in the background, it's all too distracting – but the more I looked at this, the more I liked it. I tried several "normal" B&W variations of this (since this is begging to be in B&W), but they were all either over- or under-whelming, so I started with the B&W X-Ray preset and tweaked it to brighten the tree and darken the background. There's something chillingly fascinating about the trunk of that (oak?) tree and the shape of the gnarled branches, with these very specific settings, that just "worked" for me.

Just a few steps away from the previous shot was this double-angled geometric wonder. (If you look closely, you can see the second leaning tree in this shot show up in the lower right corner of the previous photo). Another slightly tweaked version of the B&W X-Ray preset (with different settings from the last shot), this one was also processed with the intention of muting the background detail and directing the eyes toward those startling diagonals.

This was shot with a Neutral Density filter (basically like sunglasses for your camera). The ND filter blocked enough light (without affecting the color of the image, hence the "neutral" part of the name) to allow me to keep the shutter open for a minute and a half, even in bright daylight. Although there were strong winds at cloud-altitude, causing those to be blurred, there was only a light breeze where the tripod was set up, so the twigs in the foreground remained sharp.

This wasn't shot in Foggy Bottom , but Foggy Peak just doesn't sound right (to anyone who lives in this area) - so you'll just have to live with the cognitive dissonance. Or not, since a friend (who doesn’t live in DC and didn’t get the reference to the neighborhood) immediately blurted out “Misty Mountain Hop” (from the Led Zeppelin song) when she saw this photo. I like that title as well, but I’m undecided – what do you all think? Leave a comment and vote for your favorite title for this image.

We’re now at the edge of the bank of low clouds that hugged one of the peaks of Skyline Drive. Adding the Painterly Color preset to the foggy conditions made for a pleasing "dreamscape".

Those that gazed upon the form of Medusa were turned to stone and scattered about her as a warning to others.

Although it looks like a B&W photo, this is actually a Duotone (aka Split Tone). If you look closely, the highlights have a very subtle steel-blue/cyan cast to them, while the shadows have an equally subtle cast right in between green and magenta. Although this effect is barely noticeable in a superficial glance at the photo, it hopefully conveys a psychological mood that works better with the foggy surroundings than a "straight" B&W.

Here's Medusa again, a little closer this time, but with standard sharpening techniques. Although the saturation of red, orange, and green have been bumped up a bit, any fuzziness you see is strictly from the fog.

The caption pretty much says it all. I knew this one was going to end up as a B&W from the moment I shot it. This is one of my favorite trees on Skyline Drive, and I kept an eye out for it, but went sailing right past it in the fog. I realized my mistake a few minutes later, and turned the car around, as you’ll see on the video.

Another example of a B&W image with some color added. In this case, it’s just one color – a slight sepia tone – so this would be a Monotone (as opposed to Duotone). Other than that, it's a normally-processed B&W with standard sharpening options.

It was inevitable – you knew I had to do some ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) shots at some point in this set. Pointing the camera up, and giving it a broad swing while the shutter is open for an 1/8th of a second made for another "abstract study in motion". The Painterly Color preset was also applied to enhance the colors and reduce sharpness.

Pointing the camera down at a low-lying branch that was about waist-height (over a carpet of fallen leaves), then turning the camera in a circle during the 4/10ths of a second shutter speed produced this whirlwind effect. The Painterly Color preset accentuated the blur and the colors.

The shallow depth-of-field (shot at f/5.6), combined with the Painterly Color preset, have rendered this as a borderline abstract image.

Polychromasia is actually a medical term relating to blood cells, but it just sounds so cool, and it’s got “chroma” in it, so I shoe-horned into use here to describe the mind-blowing, slap-you-in-the-face colors of this shot. The funny thing is, when it popped into my head, it sounded so crazy I thought I had made it up. Then I Googled it out of curiosity, and I was surprised to see it was a real word. Hey, it’s my site, and I’ll make up and misappropriate words if I want to….

The Painterly Color preset, in the way the sharpness is turned down and the colors are saturated, sometimes has the unexpected effect in increasing the "virtual depth" of a photo. To me, this image has an almost 3-D quality, the way the foreground bushes and saplings are separated from the taller evergreens behind and the blue sky above.

Here is a variation of the Painterly Color preset using a bracketed set of three exposures of the same scene. Only the normal exposure was subjected to the Painterly Color preset - the under- and over-exposures were processed normally, with traditional sharpening techniques. When the three exposures were sandwiched into one, I found that the colors were a bit more muted (with an almost pastel feel) than if I had applied the Painterly preset to the final HDR composite. Yet that distinctive, virtual 3-D effect remained. This makes it look like it was shot in the late afternoon, or maybe with a very cloudy sky, but it was taken at noon, in full, direct sunlight. I chose not to correct that "dullness", and like the more understated feel of the final result.

I cannot tell a lie: I trudged out into the woods with my trusty camping ax, braving ticks and carnivorous ladybugs, and partially chopped down these two dead trees, laying them in an X-shape to create a more visually appealing photograph.

Actually, it turns out I can tell a lie: none of that really happened.

Except for the carnivorous ladybugs – those suckers where everywhere on this day, the air was thick with them. They must have hatched en masse - I had to brush them off my clothes every time I stepped out of the car. One even made the trip back home with me, stuck to the base of my windshield just above the wiper blades (where the force of the air wasn’t enough to sweep it away, even at highway speeds). As the gale-force winds abated when I got home, and it tentatively started to crawl up my windshield, I could swear I heard it whisper, “Oh my, Toto - we’re not in Shenandoah anymore….

This shockingly bright-red beauty, enhanced by the Painterly Color preset, was preening and showing off for the tourists in the parking lot of the Panorama wayside near the Thornton Gap gate of the park. And yes, it really was that red and that bright - one of the finest maples (?) I've seen in the park. Someone please correct me if I’m getting the types of these trees wrong.

Charlotte spun a huge web between a span of Big Red's branches. Her consummate skill, and the tensile strength of her trapeze wires, stood her in good stead as she bobbed and swayed in perfect security despite the brisk breezes ruffling Big Red's scarlet, flowing mane.

Another maple (I think), in the same parking lot as Big Red, had already lost all but a few of its leaves. The Painterly Color preset helped accentuate the stark contrast between the complementary blues and reds of leaves and sky.

Stendhal would have liked this example of selective color saturation: I muted all the colors as much as possible, while enhancing the reds slightly. At first I thought this might make a good B&W, but the reds in the background seemed too outspoken to ignore.

The same bush as the last shot, but from a slightly different angle, taking advantage of light spilling through some branches overhead. So, instead of selective color, we have an example of selective lighting that made certain parts of the blossoms glow, while keeping the background in relative shade. Some judicious dodging and burning (selectively darkening the background while enhancing the brightness of the blossoms), plus the B&W X-Ray preset, didn't hurt the cause either.

Looks like I swallowed some crazy pills again.

Taken on the surface of Neptune (where the trees look suspiciously like those here on Earth), I combined the Painterly Color preset with some radical saturation swings (de-emphasizing all but the yellows and blues and purposely over-exposing the photo) to get that strange banding-effect around the branches outlined by the sky. Normally this would be considered a serious error – the result of grossly negligent over-processing – but we're in alien-planet rule-stomping mode here, so all's fair in love and photography.

Moving to the surface of Jupiter now (which I was astonished to find had blue skies - and even roads!), I used a similar technique as the last shot, but emphasizing the reds instead of yellows.

There was a Park Service sign pointing out a yellow jacket nest in the ground right behind where I shot this, and I could hear them buzzing around my head, so I moved on right after taking the shot. When I was working on this photo in post, I imagined the yellow jackets swarming up from the ground through the trees. That yellow just contrasts so well with the blue sky - I really like the selective color saturation of this one.

Some of the effects of the photos in this set may have been subtle, to the point where you couldn’t quite put your finger on what was different. On the other hand, some of the effects are obvious to the point of inflicting blunt force trauma on the eyes. This is a case in point - but sometimes I feel like blunt force can be a good thing....shock the chakras, and all that....right? Maybe I'm just jaded, but there are time I would definitely take this stinging slap to the retinas over a "normal" fall photo.

Back on Earth, Bambi's big sister was nonchalantly crunching on acorns by the side of the road like she didn't have a care in the solar system. Since there was no traffic, I stopped the car in the middle of Skyline Drive, and when she gave me that “’Ow’s your father?” look, I fired off about a dozen shots at arm’s length without even looking through the viewfinder.

Bambi hiding in plain sight, well-camouflaged in the bushes by the Dickey Ridge Welcome Center (but looking decidedly more timid than her sister).

Bambi says “Bye, and thanks for reading my story”!

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