The leaves, they are a changing!

This autumn has been a bit of a strange one.  This isn't simply because I spent some time in the southern hemisphere and am getting confused with spring!  You may have noticed that things aren't behaving like they normally do, Halloween was the hottest on record at 23 degrees, September has been the driest on record and even now, in November (admittedly early November) I can happily walk around in a t-shirt!

One of the things that is most noticeable about this autumnal oddness is that the trees are not behaving normally, many are still very green whilst others have turned and lost most of their leaves.  This was very apparent at a walk that we went on just yesterday at Stourhead and I thought that this oddness would be a good subject for my next blog post!  What I think is happening is that some trees know when to change due to the length of the day and other know when it's time to change by the drop in temperature that we would ordinarily have seen a while ago.  Because this hasn't happened the trees that change due to day length have gone already whilst the others remain nice and green.

But enough with the science and onto the photos, yes photos, I have two that I like well enough to share today!

First up is this one which I like because of the range of colours, the autumnal reds and yellows and then the bright greens.

I took both of these with my Canon 7D and my 10-20mm wide angle lens.  This was taken at 18mm f13 1/100 at ISO 400.  In post I let auto enhance run riot and then carried out a bit more tweaking to make the final image; auto enhance added a curve adjustment in the green channel, increased the vibrancy and brightened the shadows, I took this further by adjusting the vibrancy still further and choosing to auto set the white balance.  I'm not sure I'd do anything different with this shot but I would like to go back again when the leaves are properly changing as I think it would probably make the picture even more bright and vivid.

My second picture makes me think of being a kid again and kicking through fallen leaves and I liked the colour of the golden leaves on the floor which contrasts with the bright green of the trees.  This was taken at 10mm with the same exposure settings as the picture above.

Again in post I let auto enhance have a play and then tweaked further.  The auto enhance again added a curve enhancement in the green channel and brightened the shadows.  I added nearly a full stop to the exposure (0.8) but then applied a global dodge to reduce the amount of burn in the sky.  If I took this again I may play around with getting down closer to the ground to give a kids eye view.