Autumn Is Called Fall for Good Reason

Seeing the best Fall colors in years has driven me slightly crazy this month. In trying to get back into photography, the lure of brightly colored leaves been a source of frustration thanks to uncooperative lighting and trees refusing to synchronize with each other. Then there are the winds making sure that I remember autumn is called Fall because of the leaves dropping from trees.

In the midst of this pursuit for the elusive perfect autumnal picture life has gone on.

Dad is regaining weight steadily along with his mental faculties. Sadly, his stomach still shows no signs of operating correctly, preferring to shed tissue that has to be fished out of his gastric tube with dental tools. Yeah, it has been that kind of year, what can I say?

A longtime suspicious lump of mine took me to the doctor where it was ascertained it was a benign cyst. Unless it starts causing problems, I won’t be having it removed. During the visit, I was weighed for the first time in 2014 revealing I’ve lost over twenty pounds the past year.

One might think it was stress from dealing with Dad’s cancer woes causing the loss. However, it is due to a change of diet that I started a year ago – or so I believe. A move toward eating rice while discarding most wheat consumption was the biggest change. In fact, it almost immediately ameliorated irritable bowel issues. Gradual weight loss followed aided by a move to usually only eating one meal a day.

I’m hoping to improve on the results with help from an unexpected theory falling into my lap. In trying to find a way for Dad to enjoy sweets without aggravating his hiccup problem, a dietician gave us info on research into how fructose may be a major cause of digestion problems. Printouts of which fruits, vegetables, and grains that contain fructose or fructans and those that don’t has given me a clue on why wheat bothers me but not to the extant of gluten intolerance sufferers.

Now I’m refining my diet further with this information after doing some testing to see how much fructose I can tolerate. It turns out not a lot, to my surprise. Artificial sweeteners cause similar issues and my tentative abandoning of those is now a must.

At least that’s going well. The hunt for fall colors was disappointing locally, mainly due to trying to align my energy levels with sunlight and leaves staying on the trees. Yet that wasn’t the biggest problem as illustrated by the photograph above.

What killed the hunt for the perfect shot was the bright red and blaze orange maples popping off too early at the beginning of the month. Beautiful and surrounded by still green trees, the rural ones dropped their leaves before the other trees turned.

Over the past few weeks, I’d hit the local roads looking for good shots. My timing was terrible at best, so few pictures turned out well to any degree. Here and there colors held on in the intersection of valleys thereby disproving a pet theory of mine that trees along waterways would be the best examples of Fall splendor.

It probably didn’t help that I’m still struggling to master the Fuji HS25EXR camera. My Canon digital cameras never require as much post editing to get photos where they should be, so it is a new experience. Complicating the issue has been Corel PhotoPaint X5 crashing out when adjusting the pictures. The move to a higher megapixel count exposed memory issues running under Windows 7 64bit, forcing an upgrade to Corel Draw Graphics Suite X7.

So far that native 64bit application has had no problems applying multiple levels of undoable editing, thankfully.

Yucatan’s back roads provided the most interesting subjects and I wish that I’d hit those earlier instead of the main roads. As it was, settling for scraps was an unavoidable fact. The most spectacular trees earmarked for photographing during overcast days dropped a large amount of their leaves by the time a sunny day arrived.

My favorite photo is the one on the above right.  Being a rare combination of most of the colors I was seeking, it had a nice back drop and plenty of green grass to make the colors pop out. In fact, I had to do very little contrast or color adjustments to the picture.

There were bigger, fuller trees in Houston, but I got there a day late. A day late and a dollar short – that’s the story of my life.

A late afternoon rising autumn Moon gave me a chance to further test the capabilities of the Fuji camera. What shortcomings in the pictures I’ve taken with it are my fault. Anything this compact that can take these kind of snapshots without a tripod is a technical wonder. On the left is what it looked like at the far end of the zoom and on the right is a fast and dirty edit of a crop bringing out the details of craters.

It is amazing that kind of picture can be taken with a midsize camera without a telescope.

And here is a photo of a chipmunk eating bird seed to end the post.

Why?

Why not?