Fall Color on the West Fork

As the calendar turned to November of last year I turned my attention to the possibilities of chasing the fall colors locally around Fort Worth and north Texas.  We get a hint of color that starts just before Halloween and the color really gets going in November, usually peaking around Thanksgiving and spending a month fading usually right up to winter solstice.

I have several local areas I frequent one of which is the West Fork of the Trinity River.  Here I can find a rocky river, a few waterfalls, and some great fall color.  I make it a point to be here at least one day a week throughout the month of November.

2015 was a year of great rain which had caused heavy floods in the spring and the river had been scoured clean.  That did wonders for some of the little cascades and waterfalls I visit which were now flowing well as the floods had taken the vegetation which had grown thick over the past few years.

I spent more time this fall near these little waterfalls, than I had in several years working them every weekend as I looked for fall color and watched the trees change from gree to yellow to red, and then fade into winter.

I like the rocky river bed I can find here.  We have a lot of limestone here in Texas and when you find rivers crossing it you often have good river features.

The area I visit on the West Fork is a great place to see birds and even a few deer frequent the area.  I am usually far too slow of a photographer to actually photograph them but this last fall I even managed to get a shot of one.  My longest lens is 200mm on a full frame camera so not much in the way of zoom power but I did get this image here with the little buck in the river.

No matter what the weather was, I visited the falls last fall.  As it always is in landscape photography, there were days of overcast, or clear, and just maybe good light.

I kept working the area and over the several weeks of fall managed to make a few nice images.

It is one of the reasons I always encourage people to explore the area where they live.  You might be surprised by what you find.