Getting ready for Brown County!

Planning fall workshops is maddening!  A year before you run a workshop you have to “guess” when the leaves are going to be perfect!  Well, of course this is impossible, you make your best estimation based on previous years.  Fortunately we are going to have great color at Brown County, but it doesn’t always work that way!  The fall leaf peak in the Great Smokies can come anywhere from the first week of October to the second week of November, and I’ve see it happen at different times  across that entire span!  The good news is that early fall, peak color, and late fall can all be spectacular in their own way, and that is the secret to getting good images no matter whether the leaves go early or late!

So how are we doing on fall color for this fall at our workshops?  Brown County looks excellent, should be near peak, Acadia (which is less dependent on fall color, there isn’t much there), still looks good, it will be near the end with great leaves on the ground which is perfect!   The red ground cover on Cadillac Mountain hold s

s on so we should be good to go!  The Smokies will be iffy, but if the peak is over and much of the color is on the ground, it will be perfect for stream shooting which is a lot of what we do there!  The image below shows how good a stream shot can be with the rocks covered by leaves!  Colder nights will give us the chance of frost on colorful leaves on the forest floor, another great shot!  I suspect at lower elevation we will still have some nice color in the tress, which should be perfect in the Tremont and Cades Coves areas.  Nelson Ghost Town in Nevada, no fall color there anyway!!!

The preparation for a workshop starts a year in advance, but the most important prep takes place the first day of a workshop!  That’s when you access the conditions, the weather and then go over the locations you planned to shoot, pick the right ones for the right day, and then do the very most important thing of all, get positive!  The truth is that any condition, any place, “can” yield great images, if you spend a little time figuring it out.  The problem for all of us is we have expectations, what we think things are going to be like.  How many times have you had a terrible birthday, or Christmas, or summer vacation, because things didn’t go according to “your plan!”   Here is the trick, learn how to make lemonade out of lemons.  As a working pro for the last 45 years I’ve had less than perfect condition more often than perfect ones, and I’ve managed to make wonderful images anyway!  The biggest block to great images is not hanging on the trees, it’s stuck between your ears!  So get positive, don’t look at what you don’t have, look at what you do have!  Sounds like a coach trying to get the team ready to play, but it’s the reality of being a photographer!  So so photographers depend on perfection, great photographers find greatness in any condition!

What are my plans for this fall?  To go out an show people how to make great images!  ….and not to sound cocky, but I’ll do it!!!!  The Brown County Fall Workshop with Jim Haverstock starts tomorrow night!

Blessings,

the Pilgrim