On my recent trip to Blanchard Springs, I stopped at Mirror Lake to look for reflections of autumn color in the water. Unfortunately, a lot of the leaves surrounding the lake still seemed to mostly be green. There was some color but only in small splotches that I didn’t think would make for a very good photograph.
As I was about to leave, I noticed the wooden boardwalk that begins at Mirror Lake dam and travels along and above Blanchard Spring. I photographed the boardwalk a little over three years ago, but I was not at all pleased with the results. It was the middle of the summer. The sky was sunny, the leaves were green, and the boardwalk looked like it had just been swept clean. Those pictures just didn’t seem very interesting to me. They looked like a quick snapshot. In a word, they were boring.
But, this time, the scene had completely changed. The overcast sky created a more mysterious mood. The leaves that remained on the trees were still predominantly green, but there were a lot of leaves with autumn color that had fallen to the ground. Some of those autumn leaves were also lying on the boardwalk adding an additional visual element.
Getting my equipment set up, I kept the tripod legs unextended which placed the camera about two and a half feet above the boardwalk. A lot of times shots like this are taken at eye level, but I wanted to photograph the boardwalk from a perspective most people don’t see when they are there. After all, people stand upright and walk down the boardwalk. They don’t crawl down the boardwalk on their hands and knees, so this isn’t a view they would expect to see.
I shot the scene at several different apertures to photograph with shallow to more moderate depths of field. I also shot several images in a vertical position. In the end, I liked this composition the best. To encourage the eye to follow the boardwalk all the way through the image, I set the lens at its smallest aperture, f/22, to maximize depth of field and ensure sharpness all the way down the boardwalk. I also liked the horizontal framing because it created more of a tunnel effect that implied to me a sense of peacefulness that the vertical shots did not.
In Lightroom, I added contrast, texture and clarity; increased the highlights; and boosted the colors slightly using the vibrance and saturation sliders. The final step was to open the file in Photoshop to sharpen the image using Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI.