After a long nine-plus months, I decided it was time for me to take a week off from work to rest and recharge. No phone calls, no emails, nothing. Just a blissful week away from work. Of course, I saw no need to let such a week go to waste, especially now that Autumn is here, so I took the opportunity to get out and do some photography.
My first destination was Petit Jean State Park, a location I have visited many times over the years. I hoped to find some Autumn color, but the information I had said the leaves were beginning to change in the northern part of the state. I wasn’t expecting to find eye-popping displays of color, but I was hopeful I would find at least some beginning signs of the upcoming change.
With my wife and dog in tow, we left the house and headed for Petit Jean. We arrived just minutes before sunrise and headed for the Turtle Rocks area and the Rock House Cave. Reaching the cave, I spent a few minutes trying to find the pictographs that are supposedly on the walls of the cave. I’ve always wanted to find and photograph these pictographs. But, in all the times I’ve visited the Rock House Cave, I have never been able to find a single one. But, this time. . .was no different. Oh well, maybe next time.
Leaving the cave, we found another small trail. At first, I didn’t recognize it, but eventually I realized it was the trail that heads along the top of the canyon that is home to Cedar Creek and Cedar Falls. We came upon a small rock outcropping, and I stopped to look around while my wife and dog continued on. Honestly, I’m not sure they even knew I had stopped.
Walking out on the outcropping, I could see that some of the leaves on the opposite side were starting to change color, but the predominant color remained green. I was about to leave when I noticed this one particular scene. I set up the tripod, camera, and 100-400mm lens, framed the composition, and captured the image.
I have always avoided cropping my pictures. But, over the last several months, I have found myself cropping images into different aspect ratios than my camera’s native 3:2 ratio. I have discovered that this often leads to a more balanced image that has less “wasted” space. And, that was the case with this picture.
The composition I framed with the native 3:2 aspect ratio contained a lot of additional green foliage on the right side of the picture. All of this extra foliage overwhelmed the lighter colored leaves on the left side making them seem small and irrelevant.
By cropping the image to a 5:4 aspect ratio and repositioning the photograph within the frame of that aspect ratio, I was able to balance the lighter and darker leaves in the final image, which allowed the brighter leaves to stand out in the frame creating a more pleasing picture.
Once I had cropped the photograph, I finished processing the file and opened it in Photoshop where I sharpened it and tweaked the tones a little bit more to end up with this final image.