It's Fall Foliage Times For Sure This Time

Boy, what a year, or rather season.  I searched all the sites for information and finally talked the better half into changing her vacation time from mid October to the end of September.  All the sites said the last week of September would be optimum foliage time in northeastern West Virginia.  Due to the warmer than usual weather lately, when we got there it looked like midsummer.    Green, green, green!  Okay, that was a bust.  Last weekend I was shooting with a friend in northwestern Connecticut where the color should have been spectacular.  (See Monday’s post.)  Were the colors spectacular?  No, they were green, green, green.  This warm weather this year has driven the foliage season back at least a couple of weeks.  We may be having great foliage colors in the first week of November around here.  But, there is good news.  Color has come to upper Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.  Today’s image comes from a RV trip we took through New Hampshire and Vermont a couple years ago.  As you can see, in the lower left hand corner there’s a rock wall.  Yep, the image is a small panorama taken from a “scenic overlook” on the side of a road.  The trip was pre-GPS, so unless I just happen to stumble on the road again, I haven’t the foggiest idea where this “scenic overlook” might be.  I don’t even know which state it’s in.  Anyway, to find out what makes today’s image kind of special, hit the “read more”.

If I remember correctly, this was a four shot pano, taken in a vertical format. In order to get more information for a panorama it should be shot as a vertical (portrait). I could have probably gotten a similar shot with two clicks if I’d taken it in landscape mode. The overlap would have been fifty or sixty percent. The thing is that this is only the left hand side of the entire pano. It goes on for another four or five images. Had I shot the entire panorama in landscape mode it would have ended up too thin. This was done (probably) in Adobe Photoshop CS3. The problem with doing panoramas in CS3 was that the blending of the individual shots wasn’t all that great. You can see that the sky just plain drops out on the right side. That wouldn’t happen in CS4 or CS5. The blending is just amazing since CS4. You can probably throw a camera in the air locked on high speed shutter and get something that would stitch together flawlessly.

So, here’s a toast to the coming fall colors. The hints I seen so far lead me to believe that the season will “finally” be spectacular.