Woodland Photography is Easy in Autum

Woodland is the place where landscape photographers struggle most when it comes down to find a compelling composition in the nature. Chaos, no clear subjects, distracting elements, missing isolation - this is woodland.

Whenever I look for a composition - not only in woodland - I look for contrasts. Difference between brightness and darkness, difference of sizes, an outstanding shape and so on - or especially in autumn: colour constrasts. There might be no other place in the nature where we had more contrast given by colour, than an enchanting autumn woodland.

In the photograph above I got attracted by this beautiful golden yellowish tree. It was the only one here, the others turned already to red and brown. You were not able to identify this tree as an isolated character in another time of the year, autumn gives up the necessary isolation and the light back there at the glade doesn't only give depth to the imag, it also matches fantastically with the colour palette of the rest of the scene.

Here I got attracted by these reds and browns in the foliage of this nice autumn tree. We only can see it through the isolation we get due to these yellows of the grasses in the background. The more the colours are apart in the colour wheel, the stronger gets the isolation - the more colour constrast is given. The more they are together, the more harmonic the image gets. This is a fantastic way to dose the strength of the isolation - also afterwards in post processing through shifting the colours gently, maybe to reduce contrast or even to add.

Also this image only works because of contrasting colours. We were not able to see the orange tree at the right if it had the same colour like the grasses - a situation we have all over the year, excepted by the colourful autumn.
The greens in the forgeground build a connection to the green tree at the left, which gets also isolated by the surrounding oranges and contrasts to the orange tree at the right.
 

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Nice greetings,

Christian