Lake Panorama West G.C. - Fall Color

In the middle of October, the autumn colors on the local trees were at their peak so I headed over to the Lake Panorama West Golf Course with my camera bag and tripod.

I fitted the D90 with the 24-120mm lense and put it on my Slik tripod. To add even more color to the leaves, I put a warming filter on the lense. I was in aperture priority mode at f11 or f13. ISO was 200 – 400 and then I adjusted the exposure compensation from -0.3. to +0.3 depending on the scene. Shooting in RAW would allow me to post process the images once on the computer as well.

Using View NX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight or let the program calculate the white balance automatically. The picture control was changed to landscape. To process these images later using EasyHDR, I copied the files and adjusted them to -1.0, 0, +1.0 using exposure compensation. These different exposed images were than outputted into 16 bit TIFF files to use in EasyHDR.

After getting the image done in EasyHDR, I finished them up in PSE 11. One of the main adjustments I had to make was to the color of the grass. Because I had used the warming filter to enhance the leaves, it also threw off the color of the grass. To correct this, I used a saturation layer mask and adjusted the sliders. I than reduced the opacity of this layer down until I thought the green color of the grass was correct. I used the clone brush tool to get rid of unwanted objects and then used a high pass filter to sharpen the images.

Shortly after the day I took these photographs, the wind blew and blew taking the majority of the leaves out of the trees. This put a damper on the rest of the fall scenes I was hoping to capture.

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