Another road trip

It's back to the foliage shots again today. My apologies if they're getting tiresome, but it's such a narrow window of opportunity I want to take advantage of it as much as I can. I'll do my best to make 'em as varies as I can, though.

First up, a pair of shots I took over by Lake Emerald (right across from the large rock face I photographed earlier in the year, in fact) when I was out and about at lunchtime:





After work today I decided to drive up Kelly Stand Road, as I wanted to be sure to visit the Roaring Branch while there were still leaves on the trees.



Initially I thought I was going to have to find a spot to photograph other than the one I had in mind, as when I first arrived there was a truck parked there. But after I'd turned around and was headed back down the road in search of another location I suddenly noticed that same truck in my rear-view mirror. So I pulled off, let the truck go by, then turned around once again and headed on back.

This particular spot is where another stream merges into the Roaring Branch, making it, to my mind, one of the most picturesque areas of a river that's already very photo-friendly. Not to mention that because the merging stream comes in almost perpendicular to the main one, it lets me photograph the water from a different perspective without me needing to wear my waders:



I really liked how the water curves around the rock in the bottom third of this image:



Just as I was about to put away my camera and head home, I decided at the last minute to take some narrow-aperture shots of the river. I know, I know—you'd think it would have been the first thing I did, given my fondness for that motion blur effect, but I was trying to not repeat myself quite so soon.

At any rate, as I went through the photos I'd selected for posting I realized that the two water blur photos I'd picked were very similar to some of the other images I'd selected from the earlier, regular aperture shots in terms of the angle and area shown in the frame. They're not perfect matches by any means, but I still thought it might be fun to put the similar shots side-by-side for comparison's sake.

With this first set of three images, besides the difference made by the change in aperture setting from the first two to the third picture, I think it's also interesting to note the ways in which how a shot is framed impacts how we see it. Obviously, the first and third photos, oriented horizontally, show more of the river and the surrounding territory than the second one. With the second, vertically-oriented shot, though, even though you see less of the river itself, it somehow (at least to me) provides a stronger sense of the water's flow. I suspect that's because of how the river fills the frame from left to right, drawing our eye across and slightly down. To me, it's the one that feels the most intimate of the three.

The third shot is almost a blending of the first two in some ways. It's horizontal, like the first, but covers a bit less area. Because of that, the river increases in size as your eye moves down the picture, from being barely in the top third to taking up the entire bottom third, causes the eye move similar to the way it does with the vertical shot. And the motion blur, of course, just makes it look way cooler.







Now, the second set. This comparison is much more straightforward, but it still fascinates me how that one change in the way the water looks impacts how the photo feels:





Something fun to ponder, anyway.