Fall foliage

On one of our Old Rag hikes, I had a really funny idea.  I've been to enough Art Fairs to see the work of dozens of photographers who apparently support themselves by taking nature pictures, framing them, and selling them to people.  Nice work if you can get it, and I'd be lying if I told you I hadn't considered a similar path for myself.  I've only gone far enough to order a couple prints of my pictures and gift them to family and friends.

But if I were going to start selling pictures, I'm sure my twisted humor would work its way in somewhere.

I find a lot of visuals really interesting.  They are not always things people traditionally like to view.  Bugs are fascinating, and their coloration and widely varied shapes always catch my attention.  Dead trees and fallen leaves are good, and I once took a dozen shots of a line of pot-bellied stoves and rusted truck bodies I found in the woods near Opal Creek.

But none of those were my funny idea.

In late September, I went home to see Dad for a couple days, and took some early-morning walks at the lake.  And some afternoon walks.  I like the lakes.  I walk there a lot.  And I got lots of good pictures for my funny idea.

Toxicodendron radicans

I wanted to get some nice pictures of these bright red leaves--they actually present across the fall-leaf-spectrum, but the bright red hue is most common--because i love the idea of people buying the pictures because they're pretty, with no idea of what's actually IN the picture.

I took some other pictures, too.  I really liked that early-morning light when I could get my camera to cooperate, and the heavy dew and fog gave me some good visuals of spiderwebs (hard to photograph) and dandelions (another pretty weed).

Taraxacum oficinale

Storeria dekayi

I didn't expect to see one so late in the year, but the dog and I also met a De Kay's Snake.

The afternoons gave me much brighter light for the bright red leaves I wanted for my private joke--despite being terrified of Poison Ivy, there's a surprising number of people who wouldn't know it when they saw it.  Too bad--it can actually be very pretty.

I also like taking pictures of fungus, but I don't have a good resource to identify it yet.