Fall Colors of Palo Pinto County

At the end of November I was in the field every chance I had chasing the peak weeks of our fall color here in north Texas.  Most of that was done here locally visiting various parks  but I also did a few day drives chasing the color.  Here is from another trip I did west to Palo Pinto County.  The hills and curvy roads west of the Brazos River are a great area to photograph and the colors put on a good show.

On a weekend morning we planned an early start and made the 45 minute drive to be here for sunrise.  The clouds were not cooperating like I had hoped but the trees had some nice color.  The reds did not have the pop I was seeing in Fort Worth but there were nice muted oranges and yellows that colored the hills and that made it pretty nice for photography.

With the clear sky it meant I had to change to a longer lens to extract areas of color from the scene and it helped me keep the clear blue sky to a minimum or complete exclude it from the image.

A polariser also helped put a little snap into the colors by taking glare off the leaves.  

I then went hunting through the scene looking for those ares I could pick out interesting trees, patterns of color or rocky outcroppings to put in the image.

It is a slower process for a guy who usually looks to take in the whole big picture of a  scene in a photograph.  For me I find my success rate drops dramatically with a longer telephoto lens.  However, with enough looking and taking enough images to have a good sized pool to edit from, I pulled these three as some of my favorites from the day.