Autumn in Garfield Park

A dry summer and recent rain made for a small window of opportunity to appreciate this year's autumn colors. Much like last year, where dry summer weather also bollixed autumn appreciation, leaves fell early this year and colors lacked the brilliance usually enjoyed with a normal amount of summer rainfall.

After three consecutive days of rain last week, we had a sunny Friday, so I squeezed in an hour's worth of early-evening shooting in Garfield Park in Indianapolis to capture some fall vista and sunset photographs. This post features those photos, my first attempt to play catch-up in posting images from a couple of recent shoots.

I followed the Friday shoot with a trip to Hanover in southern Indiana on Saturday to photograph the Hanover-Manchester college football game in L.S. Ayres Stadium ... and take some more images on the very scenic campus.

First, however, the Friday shoot in Garfield Park, leading (top) with a kind of revisit to a scene I first photographed in autumn about six years ago. This year's capture differs in three respects -- it's missing one of its trees, razed because of disease in the interim years; the scorching summer did not allow the grass to hold its rich green this late into the year; and I treated the image with high-dynamic range (HDR) software. The shot in 2005 was a normal, single-frame image.

With the light fading fast, I found myself chasing optimum or unusual light conditions, rather than the most brilliant color situations.

Above: A portrait (vertical) orientation of the scene at the top. 

Above: Another scene I recall capturing previously, although I believe I took the earlier photo in 2006, the year after I grabbed the one above. Like the previous capture, the leaves at the top were gone by the time I arrived.

Above: This critter -- feeling relatively safe -- allowed me to get pretty close, relatively speaking, anyway. Still, I use the maximum length on the Tamron 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD lens I had on my Canon 7D. It was hammering away at this acorn so fiercely that the noise of its teeth scraping or digging into the shell was audible from where I was standing.

Above: The west side of the Garfield Park Arts Center, with the setting sun reflected in the window on the far left, and a splash of the park's autumn colors providing a bookend on the far right.

Above: It might seem odd to photograph a recycling bin, but the reason will become apparent in the bottom two photographs. Even without those photos below, the artwork on this bin was impressive enough, I felt, to warrant a photo. The rusty color you see on the far right bottom corner of the bin is from a thin splay of setting sunlight, coming from the left.

Above and below: I decided to compose this shot when I saw how the setting sun was lighting up the recycling bin below the tree on the right. I'm posting both compositions because I couldn't decide between the one above, where the sun and the bin reflection are more subdued, and the one below, where both are more intense as a result of a slight movement of my position in relation to the subjects.