2500 miles and 9 states in 6 days - it was a whirlwhind driving tour of the northeastern US. I drove basically a triangle from Michigan to Massachussets to West Virginia and then back home again. The goal was to relax and do some fall color photography but with averaging 400+ miles per day it wasn’t exactly relaxing. In many of the cases, either the weather was bad or the light was bad, or the fall color was bad, and if that was the case then I kept driving to the next spot.
All the pictures can be seen here:
http://www.arisingimages.com/fineart/roadtrip_2006/index.htm
Here are some of my favorite pictures from my third annual road trip.
This first pic was over a small lake somewhere in Connecticut I think.
Graveyard near Bashbish falls in Massachusetts. It was a crazy misty and foggy morning. I drove by this site, threw the car in reverse and took a couple pics. The waterfall I was trying to get to was inaccessible because of road construction. By the time I turned around to go back to the highway, I drove by this same cemetary 10 minutes after this picture was taken and all the fog was gone and it looked like a different place. I loved the eerieness of this shot.
Right after the rain, I saw this leaf on the ground with perfect water droplets and the soft overcast light reflecting off of them.
Palisades Interstate Park was one of the first places I got to where the fall color was still in peak season and the weather was great. I loved the composition of this windy road going through the trees.
This is a scene in Childs State Park in Pennsylvania. It was a bit of a rainy ugly day…which is PERFECT for the soft light you need to capture this type of an image.
This is the Bromley-Lowe mill in Bucks County Pennsylvania. What a peaceful place. The sound of the babbling brook turning the waterwheel and the little bells from the sheep in the yard realy helped to make me feel like I was living in a different time.
I had a chance to visit my friend Phil in Washington DC. When he went to work, I spent the day walking around DC to see the monuments. It was one of the windiest days I can rememer and I it was crazy to watch people leaning into the wind to avoid getting blown off balance. The wind sure made those flags fly today!!
This is the Jefferson Memorial. The moody clouds and light making the dome glow are what really caught my eye here.
After leaving D.C., I headed to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. I missed the sunrise by about 30 minutes but was still able to capture the soft light coming over the layers of hills off in the distance.
I found this gnarly old tree off of one of the overlooks of the Skyline drive in Shenandoah. In the higher elevation areas the leaves were already gone so I had to try and find other subjects to photograph.
This was one of the windows at the Glade Creek Mill in Babcock State Park, WV. I love the way that the fall color light was reflecting off the windows causing a nice compliment of colors with the yellows and blues.
Here is an image showing the whole Glade Creek Mill. It was a cold and peaceful morning with nobody there other than a few other photographers.
It was difficult to find peak color in the trees…much more difficult than I expected at this time of year at least. This particular image was shot off the side of a highway in West Virginia. When driving you could hit an area of peak color and then around the next bend, everything was dead and brown so when the color was there, I had to pull over to appreciate it.
On my way home I stopped in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and had dinner with my friend Chris Jamison who is also a fellow photographer. Chris told me about the west end overlook so I went up there to catch the sunrise over the city and then drove home.
