Autumn stroll at Yates Mill Pond Park

 

Wednesday was a day to decompress from Tuesday's unfortunate presidential election, so I spent an hour or so strolling the mile trail around Yates Mill Pond at the state park in Raleigh. 

Trees there were showing autumn colors, but I elected to lead with a photo of the wooden pedestrian bridge reflected in the almost-still waters of the pond (above), captured across the way while traversing the trail. 

We saw little wildlife Wednesday, other than squirrels, a few turtles and a beautiful blue heron. Sadlly, the heron flew over us quickly as we cross the bridge in the photo above and landed too far from us for our iPhone cameras to do it justice. Nevertheless, I gave it a try, and my best shot appears among the other shots below. 

Above and below: The pond, reflections and fall colors. 

Above: Wild, dried grass draped over the fence marking the park's southeastern perimeter. 

Above and below: Horizontal and vertical orientation shots of a root cluster and the corresponding tree trunks found along the trail. 

Above: A mix of yellow and red leaves from stacked branches of different trees in front of me along the trail. 

Above: A downed tree trunk off the beaten path, er, trail. 

A tree trunk whose branches of varying directions and configurations struck me as interesting.

Above and first two photos below: Shots of the trail I was on.

Above: Leaves with differing autumn colors.

Above: A short tree trunk stub that looks like it's been in this abbreviated state for some time.

Above: A few turtles not far from the trail on the far side of the pond.

 

Above and first two below: A few different framings of the mill, the first integrating foliage immediately in front of me across the water, the two others after I found unobstructed openings to grab shots without interference. 

Above: This shot shows the most autumn color, but unfortunately it was taken in a backlight situation. Hoping to add some definition and contrast, I ran a copy of the image from my high-dynamic range (HDR) software. After slight crops to the top and bottom and a slight enhancement to the orange, red and green colors, I got the photo you see below. One enhanced definition I was particularly pleased with was the reflection in the water of the red leaves from trees along the shore. 

Above and first six photos below: views of whitened branches and foliage on trees along the shore of the pond on the other side of the pedestrian bridge. I've always liked these tree shapes, whose appeal increases during autumn when they take on this white coloring. 

Above: Resting amid this foliage is the blue heron, but I was so far away from it, that my iPhone couldn't do it justice ... and cost me some sharpness to boot when I elected to use near maximum zoom. 

Above: A cool fall color combo on these leaves.

Another first: Another photographer's fall leaf, floral compositions

In the past year or so, I’ve been on a roll using this blog for various “firsts” — first nonfiction prose series (On Hoosier Gridirons), first recap of photos of a specific subject matter (Garfield Park … in Pictures), first one-post recap of a long-running, intermittent series (Indy Acoustic Cafe Series) and most recently, the first post devoted to a musical review (Søren Bebe Trio et al).

So in that vein, today’s post marks another first here at Photo Potpourri: The first devoted entirely to the work of another shooter. Well, it is the first such post since I halted the yearlong monthly series "Photographer in the Spotlight" in the very early years of this blog. 

The photos you see in today’s post are the work of Lee Ann, my better half, who was inspired by the change of season fall colors to create these line pattern compositions — all on the confines of our wooded property. She took all of these with her iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Lee Ann has mentioned many times that the only period of her working career that she felt eager to go to work and also indulge her yen for artistic creativity was the few years she oversaw a crew of traveling portrait photographers on the East Coast, trying to earn a living as a single mom. 

I mention this to establish that she has a photography background, so compositions you see here come to her honestly. I didn't do any edits or cropping on these, deciding to leave them in their original compositional element ... with one exception. I rotated the seventh photo below one degree to the left to make it horizontal. 

The last photo in this post actually was taken from inside the house looking out into the yard, using the window blinds as a geometric compositional aid. The flowers are from plants Lee Ann purchased for placement on the back deck. The background lines you see in the first few photos are the creases in the deck flooring.