It's Fall Y'all! Time To Plan Your Fall Color Trips And Gear!

It's Fall Y'all! Time To Plan Your Fall Color Trips And Gear!

It’s September, our favorite time of year for landscapes far and near. The creative opportunities are endless in autumn with the beautiful gold, crimson and orange peppered backdrops nature provides. Capturing fall color may seem easy, but creating a stunning image requires more than a quick snap of the shutter.

Photos by Michael Ryan

The most important filter for fall is the polarizer. It’s hands down the best filter for deepening blue skies, saturating colors and reducing reflections and glare in bright conditions. Polarizing filters allow you to overcome obstacles that otherwise would be impossible to correct without a filter, yes, even digitally. There is no substitute for creating a great image in-camera. The added clarity and saturation allows your subjects to stand out and the foilage to pop. Photographer Michael Ryan uses Hoya’s Evo-Antistatic Circular Polarizer to make his fall color pop. He also uses Hoya’s Evo-Antistatic UV filter to filter UV light. Evo-Antistatic filters are perfect for outdoor environments where dust, wind, rain are common.

Fall is perfect for playing with colors and depth of field. Experiment with larger apertures to create images with shallower depth of field. Out-of-focus portions of the frame are great opportunities for creative composition. You can draw the eye toward details and shapes that are key subjects within the photograph. Images with shallow depth of field can also help to create an aesthetic and mood that is quieter and more contemplative. This can be a highly effective technique when shooting autumn forest scenes in soft diffuse light.

Photos by Michael Ryan: in the above photo he used Evo-Antistatic UV, below he used the Evo-Antistatic circular polarizer.

Autumn officially begins in one week so start planning your trip now using the 2018 interactive fall foliage prediction map at SmokyMountains.com.

The map is simple to use and pretty straightforward. Use the slider to select your desired date and watch as the map changes color revealing when your area will be at No Change, Minimal, Patchy, Partial, Near Peak, Peak, and Past Peak fall foliage conditions.

Thanks for sharing this awesome resource SmokyMountains.com. They’ve been providing this resource for years and landscape photographers across the nation rely on it. Don’t just take our word for it, check it out for yourself by clicking here.

Happy shooting leaf peepers!