Autumn Colors on Lake Panorama

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Nikon 70-300mm f4-5.6 VR Lense, SB-700 Speedlight, Vanguard Abeo Plus 363CT Tripod, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

This fall, I was looking forward to the autumn tree color after a dry summer that can produce brilliant leaf color and the south shore of the main basin of Lake Panorama didn’t disappoint. One morning, I headed there with my camera equipment and started shooting with the sun shining on the shore.

I used the 70-300mm lense on my D750 and put the set up on the VanGuard tripod to help with sharpness along with I was going to shoot some pano images. Shooting in RAW, ISO was at 100 with an aperture of f7.1. I used live view to help focus and then turned off autofocus and VR on the lense. To help with the dramatic range of colors of the scene, I used bracketing on the D750 too. A three second self timer was used on the camera too. I shot from three or four different locations around the marina to capture these images.

Using Lightroom Classic, I first used the landscape preset and either left the white balance at shade or changed it to direct sunlight. I increased the saturation slider on red, yellow and orange to help enhance the fall color. Lens correction for the 70-300mm was applied to the images as well. I also used the graduated filter tool to improve the look of the water or trees has the final step in LR.

To create the panoramic images, I used LR to combine four or five different images into one using its panoramic feature that worked well for these images.

In Photoshop CC, unwanted objects were first cloned out using the clone tool or content aware fill tool. Next came layer adjustments using the levels and vibrance masks to put one final color adjustment on the water and trees. The brush tool was used on these masks to determine which parts of the images I wanted adjusted. I then straightened and cropped the image if needed. A sharpening layer was then applied as the last step of the process.

Just days after capturing these images, the trees were past their prime color and the wind started to blow the leaves off so I think I captured the south shore at its peak this fall. 

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