I've said this many times on this blog, but Autumn is my absolute favourite time of the year. I love the golden leaves on the trees and the Autumn light. While the season is only beginning here in Ireland, already the trees are starting to turn. The once dense green foliage has started to thin out and the canopy of leaves has gone from a deep lush green, to a speckled patchwork of green and gold.

I was walking through one of the parks in Dublin city the other day, and the light was just perfect. It was still fairly early and the clouds had just parted, so there was a lovely glow to everything. I had my X-Pro 2 with me and so I started taking shots. As an experiment I decided to use a warmer white balance to enhance the yellowing leaves. Some scenes were still quite contrasty too, and so I shot some bracketed exposures to make some HDR shots with too. I was using the 18-55mm f/2.8 - 4 and I find this a great walk around lens with the X-Pro 2.

Autumn seems to have come a bit early here too. Normally, it would be into September before the leaves would have tuned so much, but this year, we seem to be in the thick of it already. Of course there is still a long way to go yet. My favourite part of the season is September / October as the sun starts getting low and you get a beautiful light long into the mornings. Weather is usually a bit drier in Autumn here too, as our summers have a tendency to be wet, this year being no exception. Of course, sometimes the weather in Autumn is horrendous too.

Back in Lightroom, I was happy with how some of the shots turned out. Some of them were a little too warm so I had to tweak the white balance back towards the cooler end of the spectrum. I also used my own "Steely Blue" presets on the photos. This added an extra bit of oomph to the shots, and I think helped enhance the feel. Images from the X-Pro 2 work quite well with Steely blue. The colour tweaks in the preset worked with the combination of colours in the shots to help emphasise the golden browns. Steely Blue is my general all round set of presets for adding a bit of impact to an image, and I tend to go through periods of using it an not using it. As it’s one of my older sets I don’t talk about it that much, but it works well for these kinds of shots. Here’s a before and after:

Here’s the rest of the shots from the series. I’m hoping to get as much imagery of Autumn as possible this year, and possibly do a coffee table book or something similar.

Help Support the Blog

All of the work I do here, and the information on this blog is done entirely free of charge and takes up quite a bit of work. I want to spend more and more time on this blog, and offer more and more of this kind of information, tips and so on, so If you like what I'm doing here and want to show support, then you can do so by buying something from my Digital Download Store. I have Lightroom Presets, and e-books all available for download.

If you're a Fuji X-Trans shooter and Lightroom user, check out my guide to post processing X-Trans files in Lightroom. I also have a guides for processing X-Trans files in Capture One and Iridient Developer.

If you want to get regular updates, and notices of occasional special offers, and discounts from my store, then please sign up for the Newsletter.

Featured