The Year that Was 2022 — Stories Behind My Favorite Images of 2022 (Part 3 — New England Fall)

Happy Holidays!

This is the third installment of posts featuring my favorite images of 2022. You can find the first and the second at the links.

This year the fall colors came out in force in New England. In the few years I’ve been here, I believe this one was the best from Fall colors perspective. I am still wading through the many images I took during this period, but I already have several that are among my all time favorite shots.

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On one of the weekends we went to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. We started at the Little White Church in Eaton, hoping for some mist above the lake, but it didn’t materialize. We drove into the mountains and, as often is the case, noticed a dilapidated farm on our way to Conway. I doubled back and we stopped for a few minutes to photograph the barn. This image also has a very nice black and white version, which didn’t make it onto this list.

Abandoned Barn near Conway, New Hampshire

We drove through the Cancagamus highway, stopping in several locations. most of the images from that drive are still waiting to be edited. In the afternoon we climbed the Artists Bluff hike near Franconia Notch for sunset. The location was extremely crowded to the point of people creating a traffic jam on the way down. We stayed at the overlook until the sun hid behind the mountains. I took out my long lens and took shots of the trees on the mountain slopes across from us, basking in the light of the settling sun, glowing gold.

Fields of Gold. Trees in the Light of the Settling Sun at Artists Bluff, New Hampshire

Last Call. Fall Trees at Franconia Notch as Seen from Artists Bluff, Bathed in Last Rays of Settling Sun

After going to the White Mountains, I spent a couple of days in the Berkshires. On one of the mornings I went to Bash Bish falls for my first visit to that staple of Massachusetts Berkshires. I came early enough for sunrise and was the only person at the falls, giving me the opportunity to take my time and photograph the falls framed by Fall-colored trees.

Bash Bish Falls in Fall Colors

This year I participated in the art fair at the Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, Connecticut. The fair is organized by Historic New England and is one of several I did with them. All the fairs were very well organized and well attended in beautiful locations across New England. At this show I was contracted to do custom work. while doing that I took one of my favorite fall shots this year, which I am including in this list with the clients’ permission.

Light through the Canopy

Often the images we love the most are the ones from our local area or those which remind us of great experiences. There are several locations near Lancaster, Massachusetts, which I pass every day on my way to and from work. One of them is a small wooded area. I always wondered how it would look with some fog. So, one day, I woke to a nice misty morning, grabbed my camera and headed out. When I was almost done and was about to head back, I captured the following image of the most beautiful God Rays breaking through the trees, with the last of the morning mist helping bring them to life.

Let There Be Light

Another location, which I see every day, and which was the source of endless frustration for me is a large wetland area near highway 70. My frustration comes from the fact that the area looks amazing, but there is just no place to stop without risking being run over. One day, I finally got so jealous of the amazing light and mist in this area that I went to google maps and tried to figure out how I can get to it. I found an access point from a cemetery in the residential neighborhood near by. Although I didn’t get the full view of the wetland area, I got enough to capture a few of my favorites this year. Two of them make it to this list, but there are several more, which were “almost”.

Misty Morning in Lancaster

I came early enough to be able to explore a little, to capture the heavier mist during the blue hour, and to capture the rising sun backlighting the mist over the wetland.

Of Sun and Mists

Kimball Farm is another location I pass on my daily commute. One morning, I just had to stop to capture the misty trees there. The wisps of mist backlit by the rising sun created this eerie atmosphere straight out of the Lord of the Rings.

Misty Morning at Kimball Farm

Old Stone Church in West Boylston is a location I keep going back to. It is only a few minutes drive away from my house, and offers a variety of shots in different conditions. I am still missing some good winter shots of the location, but I was able to capture a few good Fall shots this year.

Colors and Reflections

Sunset and Mist at the Old Stone Church

We finished up our Fall season this year with a two-day trip to Cape Cod. This is the first time I went there, and I will definitely go back. On the first evening we stopped at Race Point beach for sunset. This was one of the most amazing sunsets and afterburners I have seen, and it resulted in two images to cap off this installment of my favorite images of 2022. A perfect ending.

Sunset at Race Point Beach

Watching the Sunset

Happy Holidays!

Field Trip to Night Lights at New England Botanic Garden (Tower Hill) and How to Use Long Exposure for Creative Effect and to Remove People from Shots

It’s the time of year when lights and light shows come out to celebrate the holiday season. This year was the first time I went to the Tower Hill Botanic Garden to see the Night Lights decorations. The visit was as part of the field trip with the Worcester County Camera Club, though I arrived a bit later than everybody else.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display Main Garden

The displays at the garden are beautiful and offer a variety of subjects to get your creative juices flow. Night photography of this type brings a set of challenges in addition to those you would have under normal lighting conditions. And then, there are a lot of people walking around, enjoying the show and the atmosphere, who you would not necessarily want in your shots.

Let’s get the easy things out of the way. All the normal composition “rules” apply, so I am not going to dwell on that. If allowed, bring a tripod. Granted, many cameras from the last five years both have a good low-light performance, and have sensor stabilization. If you have one of those, you might get away with hand-holding your camera. My camera is about twelve years old and has pretty bad low light performance. While it does have image stabilization, it is probably a couple of stops. Good, but not nearly enough. So, it is a tripod for me. In addition, if you want to shoot long exposure like the shot above, you would need a tripod anyway (but more about it below).

Trees Lit with Colorful Lights at the Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display

One of the challenges when shooting this type of scenes is getting the white balance right. Now, many newer cameras have a good automatic white balance, so, this might not be an issue. Mine is a hit and miss under these conditions. So, if you wanted another reason to shoot RAW rather than JPEG, white balance is it. Adjusting white balance later in Lightroom to suit your taste and to match the scene colors the way you remember them is easy.

Another pitfall you would not necessarily think of when considering night light displays is that they are very high dynamic range. Now, if you don’t mind blowing the highlights at the lights or losing all the details in the night sky or shadowy areas, that’s not a problem. However, generally, you want those. Or at least you want the option to decide later when you edit your shot. So, I suggest bracketing the images just in case. And that’s another reason to have a tripod. Now, I shoot exposure bracketed images hand-held all the time (mostly because I am lazy to get my tripod out), but that’s when you have enough light or when you need a fast shutter speed for other reasons, such as freezing movement in your shot.

Night Lights displays automatically lend themselves to sun-stars effect. If you don’t know what it is, that’s the spokes around the lights in the first image above. Those happen naturally to a varying degree as you close down your aperture, which you tend to do anyway if you want to get everything in your image in focus. The number of spokes corresponds to double the number of aperture blades on your lens and some lenses have more beautiful sun-stars than others.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display

Finally, what do you do when there are a lot of people that you don’t want in your shots? Well, you can wait if you are very patient and lucky. A little hard to do if there are a lot of people like on the night when I was at the Tower Hill, and especially if it is pretty cold and you can freeze your butt off waiting. You could also shoot many shots with people passing through and then try to remove people in Photoshop by combining the different shots. Doable, but sometimes can be cumbersome. And finally, you can use long exposure.

We’ve all seen images of water smoothed out by long exposure to give it that ethereal look or the shots with streaks of clouds to show movement. In our case, you want your exposure to be long enough so the people passing through your frame don’t register. Or at least don’t register enough to see like in the shots above, all of which were taken with a thirty second exposures. You do need to experiment with this, as you can get “ghosts” if your exposure is too short or the people are too slow. So, make sure to check before you leave. In my case, thirty seconds were generally enough during this trip, but if not, use neutral density filters to slow your shutter speed down even more if you need to.

Old South Church in Boston

Arthur Ravenel Jr Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina

You can, of course, use the long, or “longish” shutter speeds for other creative purposes such as creating the light streaks from cars like in the image above taken at the Old South Church in Boston or the one on the right taken at the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in Charleston.

For this, you will need to experiment (strange how often that’s the answer to our questions about what works best in photography). The reason is that you want your shutter speed to correspond to the speed the cars are moving in your frame. This will also be complicated by the focal length you are using. So, for example, the shot in Boston was taken at ten seconds, while the one in Charleston was fifteen seconds.

And just to have some fun at the end of this post, here are a couple of shots I took at Gloucester Cathedral during my trip last spring. These corridors were used to shoot scenes in the Harry Potter movies. So, naturally, I wanted to fill them with ghosts. To do that, I took several longer exposures with me walking into the frame for parts of the exposure, until I got the effect I wanted. And then, I combined several images in Photoshop to place the “ghosts” in different locations in the frame.

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Ghosts at the Gloucester Cathedral