Everyone knows about the brilliant colors of Autumn in New England. For three or four weeks every year hotels and restaurants all over New England fill with visitors eager to experience the thrill of scenery that captures the imagination.
Larches along the bog. One original photo captured in this location.
If you have never experienced "peak" foliage it is an experience that should be on everyone's "bucket list". But this entry focuses on the period after peak that is a well kept secret of locals. Native peoples of the region variously referred to the time as the Golden season or the yellow season. The peak of foliage has passed - and so too have the crowds. The days are crisp but the bitter cold of winter has not yet set in, and the slow pokes of the autumn season - the
tamaracks (larches) and occasionally the birches and beeches continue to show off in the sea of brown that are the remnants of peak foliage passed.
It was at just this time, that I choose to seek out an image or two that captured the beauty of this season. On a drive from Franconia to Woodsville, New Hampshire, I came upon a bog with brilliant larches amid the browns and greens of the hardwoods and (other) conifers. I stopped and spent a good deal of time exploring around the bog and capturing images that struck my fancy. As is often the case, one simple spot yielded a plethora of views - all worthy of an image.
A chance "fly by" of migrating geese later in the drive found itself woven into one of the resulting "Mindscapes".
For some of the resulting images, describing them as Mindscapes might seem a stretch because a casual glance may lead you to conclude that the changes reflect only a modest amount of manipulation of contrast, brightness and perhaps saturation. Without a long explanation of why this is not the case, let me simply state that the changes reflect more than these simple changes.
Using the original image above for the first image below, I emphasized the yellows of the Larches and some of the grasses in the water to arrive at the image I call Franconia Bog Larches Mindscape below.
Franconia Bog Larches Mindscape
As stated earlier, a chance encounter with a flock of geese, provided fodder for the Mindscape below, entitled Larches & Geese Mindscape.
Larches & Geese Mindscape
From a different vantage, I captured the image below. Note that the larches appear to be brighter than in the original of the first image. I can only explain this as an anomaly in the way the camera captured the light from one image to the other.
By emphasizing certain elements of the image and de-emphasizing others, the image below, entitled Franconia Bog Fresco was created.
Franconia Bog Fresco
Another Image, slightly closer to the focal point of the scene lent itself to the creation of several different Mindscapes. The original image Franconia Pond and Larches #9 has led to the creation of the five different images the first of which you will see below.
Franconia Pond Larches Mindscape #9
From this one original image I created 5 different Mindscapes, the first of which you see above. The other four can be seen by
clicking here.
