Autumn can be a beautiful time to get outside and wander the local trails, especially if you happen to have a creek winding through the hills in the forest. Today’s photograph is of a small section of South Fork Quantico Creek from late October of 2020. Some leaves had fallen, others were still changing color to the various shades of yellow, orange and brown typical of this area. There was enough water flowing through the creek to create small sections of rapids over the underlying rocky outcrops, another feature typical of this area.

It was a very pleasant day for this type of photograph, still reasonably early and slightly overcast, providing a nice soft light. The temperature was comfortably cool, not enough to give that crisp feeling, but enough to warrant a thin jacket. The trail mostly paralleled the creek but sometimes shifted into the woods and rose to the top of a hill before dropping back down to the creek, so it was good both for photography and a workout.

When I found this spot I started exploring, looking through the camera at different compositions, trying different angles, looking both up and down stream, from atop the rocks and in the water. This was one of the shots I ended up liking. I’ll likely share at least one more in a future post. I’d very much like to return to this section of creek. I have other ideas of things I’d like to try. I suspect at this point most of the leaves will have fallen, but I’d be curious to keep returning and seeing how the scene shifts throughout the year.

From a technical perspective, this was a fairly simple shot. I used my 16-35mm lens at 16mm with an aperture of f/11. I had my Singh-Ray LB Warming Circular Polarizer on the lens to control reflections on the water and help saturate the colors. Raising the ISO to 500 gave me a shutter speed of 1/6 second, enough to show the flow of the water, but not so slow to completely smooth it out. In post-production I used Adobe Lightroom to perform some level of dodging and burning and various other typical adjustments, attempting to keep things looking fairly natural.

I hope you like the results. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

South Fork Quantico Creek, October 2020 is available for purchase from my online store as wall art or on a variety of products.

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