After a week of agency presentations, endless marketing and networking, and the realisation that I’d not actually hit a shutter button in ernest in almost a week, fate suddenly decided that I was owed a reward late Thursday afternoon. I’m still on the challenging and so far, fruitless pursuit of good autumn (fall) colour (color) this year, but on my way back from a local agency the clouds cleared and the late autumn sunlight brought out the reds and browns of autumn beautifully. There’s a few local areas that I know will make good photographs at the right time that I keep in my proverbial back pocket for such a moment. Time was tight. It was 3pm by the time I got back to the ranch, and the sun would be gone for the day in just over an hour. Quickly changing and grabbing my ready prepared backpack (which I am never actually disciplined enough to keep “always” ready), I trawled through my Evernote “locations” notebook (there’s no way I could keep all that information in my ageing grey-matter) and quickly decided on a location.

Ever the adventurous, I must have strayed all of around two feet from the car for this photograph and at the point of making it, I knew exactly how I was going to process it and how the final image would appear. The post would consist of merging a 5 stop exposure range using LREnfuse (it creates a far subtler HDR image than the likes of Photomatix or HDR Efex Pro and is now my go to tool for this kind of work), lifting the browns, reds and yellows a little and toning down the Tarmac a little.
That’s it. Nothing more to it.