The headline on this post was the sentence that kept running through my head as I tried to finish my 2.5-mile walk Monday morning at Yates Mill Pond Park.
And I’m talking about photo compositions involving light, shadows, lines and patterns like what I did for a recent previous post. But this time, my dallying was twice as involved, because I also was stopping to photograph fallen colored leaves, something I’ve been doing each autumn for the past several years.
I’ll save the leaves for a separate post and use this one to concentrate on the spectacular light patterns I was coming across. I did not start out the walk expecting to do any photography. But I’d seen sundry shadow shapes on recent past walks through the forest at Yates Mill, so I guess I sensed early on that I was going have to surrender to the urges to make pictures of it all.
Because of the picture-taking, it took me an hour and a half to get through the full course, something I usually accomplish in about 56 minutes, give or take a few. But I really liked a lot of the images I ended up getting.
Halfway through the picture-taking (and trail course), I had a brainstorm to start using my iPhone 13 Pro’s portraiture feature to force a smooth bokeh background (f/2.8ish) into as many of the shots as I could. I learned that the portraiture feature also gives me an option to blow up (zoom in, actually) up to three times the normal distance.
So if you see a sweet depth of field background, it probably was one of those shots using the portraiture feature.
The boardwalk bridge over the creek shown in the lead-off photo should be familiar to anyone who runs or walks the park’s Creekside Trail. It sits at the far west point of the 2-mile course where it splits into two directions, forming a half-mile loop and returning users to this bridge, where walkers and runners can either begin the return trip to the parking lot ... or do the half-mile loop a second time.
For several months now, I’ve done two turns on the half-mile loop during each walk in order to add some distance to my outing. And for the early part of the recent period, I’d also concluded with a trek around the Millpond Trail, giving me another 0.6 miles, for a total of 3.1 miles, the exact distance of 5K. But after a month or so of doing that, I was feeling a little feeblish hours later at home, so I decided to remove the Millpond Trail from my self-made course, bringing me back to about 2.5 miles. That seems to be the sweet spot for me. But I digress …
The first two photos below are different (opposite) perspectives of the same subject. I liked the second one a little better because it reminded me of a set of eyes and a nose. In the shadows on the tree in the third photo below, the shapes conjured an image of two dancers.
But everyone sees something different, so I won’t try to make you think of what I might have seen in the shapes appearing in the rest of the images here. Use your own imagination. So many people visit art galleries in anticipation of what they might see — if anything — in various artists’ work.
To view a gallery containing these and other photos from Monday that aren’t in this post, just follow the link in this sentence. The next post will be devoted the fallen leaves I photographed on this visit.
Check out my traveling photographer blog, Travelin’ Shutterbug
