Jeepers Creepers

Sue had a park meetup with a friend. I had an hour to wander about and take some pictures. One of my notions was to drive directly, opposite across the river and take some snaps of the pair from the other bank.

I had to use my longest lens, fully extended, so I opted for a very fast shutter speed to try to minimize camera shake. That, along with stabilization activated on the lens, yielded a pretty good result, all things considered.

In the next photo, I didn't have the lens quite fully extended because  I was happy to capture some of the nearer foliage out of focus for effect. This blurry effect is known as bokeh but more often occurs in the background than the foreground.

The area that I was in is woodland but very scrubby. I ambled along the path (it's not long) and managed to photograph a few instances of leaves turning colour. Once again, I was at a distance and using my telephoto fully extended. Even then, I had to do a lot of cropping in post to get what I wanted. Note: that is out-of-focus bokeh in the background.

Despite cropping, there remained much distraction in the next photo, so I replaced the background entirely with black. While I am able to recognize maple and oak leaves, I remain ignorant of most leaves and wild flowers, but someone on Flickr has advised me that this is a Virginia Creeper, which surprises me quite a lot. Conditions were very contrasty, so a part of the leaf is pretty well blown out.

Who knows what kind of a colour display we'll have this year with so many trees having been ravaged by gypsy moths. Little bits like this might have to suffice. We shall see what we shall see.