Autumn seems to be in full force in the northern third of Arkansas, but in Central Arkansas, where I live, the season hasn’t fully arrived quite yet. A lot of the trees still have most of their leaves, and a lot of those leaves are still green. It really looks more like late September rather than mid-November.
Last week, my continuing quest to find Autumn leaves took me to the Dagmar Wildlife Management Area. Since it was a Friday, I thought I would have the place pretty much all to myself, so I was surprised to find a couple of the campsites were already occupied. When I got home later that morning, I discovered the reason for the unexpected guests: the next morning was the opening of the modern gun deer season. I’m glad I got up and went the day I did! I wouldn’t want to be in the woods when the guns start blazing even if I were wearing hunter orange.
As I expected, the leaves were mostly green, but I wasn’t going to let that deter me, and I was determined to find something to photograph. Undeterred, I made my way to Hickson Lake where I found this grouping of oak trees that sported a wonderful mix of green and yellow leaves.
Oak trees dressed in their Autumn colors, Arkansas
I spent about half an hour at that location before I started making my way back to the main highway. Driving along, I came to a sharp curve that had a nice little parking area. I stopped and gave the area a quick look, but nothing really excited me. But, as I got back in my truck to keep moving along, I happened to catch the road as it curved through the trees. It’s very rare that I photograph a scene and have a title in mind for the image before I even press the shutter button. This was one of those rare situations.
A gravel road winds through the forest, Arkansas
On a bit of a side note, I’ve been watching some of James Popsys’ videos on his YouTube channel, and one of the things I’ve noticed James does is that he almost always handholds his camera. This got me to thinking: would handholding my camera help me with my own photography by giving me more freedom to move around without the burden of handling a tripod? The only way to answer that question was to try it, so my goal for that morning was to not use my tripod at all.
So, how did that experiment go? Well. . .not very well. I found myself taking pictures that I knew would not be very good simply because it was easy to do – point the camera and press the shutter button. Within about 10 minutes, I decided I wasn’t really accomplishing anything and pulled out the tripod. In fact, both of these images were taken with the camera securely attached to my tripod.
But, the experience was certainly not a complete failure. While the compositional quality of my images wasn’t as strong as I would have liked, I found the lack of a tripod to be quite liberating. So, I intend to try this again in the near future and see if I can do any better. But, I will be more mindful of the compositional aspects since those do not change whether I handhold the camera or use a tripod. I will also limit the “handholding period” to a certain amount of time, maybe 20 or 30 minutes, because trying to give up my tripod use cold turkey may have been too much to take on the first time.
I don’t know what the results of this experiment will be. In the end, I may find that I simply prefer to use a tripod for most of my photography, and that’s fine. I’ll at least have tried something a little bit different.