It Aint Gonna Happen
November 29th, 2009
Well, that “fall into winter” photo that I wanted to shoot isn’t going to happen. I have a model scheduled for tomorrow, and the weather is supposed to be cooperative, so I thought I might still be able to pull it off, despite the wind and rain we’ve had causing things to progress beyond the ideal point for the photo.
Then I realized that tomorrow is the first day of deer gun season here in Ohio. Shit! I don’t go in the woods during deer gun season. Way too many “Pumpkin People” as Dave Swanson likes to call them, wandering around out there with a shotgun and a six-pack. Someone gets killed every year because a drunken idiot hunter thinks they look like a deer. And, the location I had in mind…and the one where I shot Angie earlier when the sun was against me…is a public hunting area. I ran into a bow hunter there when I was scouting the place.
Bow hunters don’t worry me. They tend to know what they are doing, and they wait to be sure of their target before the let fly with an arrow. There could well have been one or more of them watching while Angie and I did our photos because they wear camoflage and stay hidden waiting for a deer to come along. If they were there, we’d never know unless we happened to walk right up on one of their blinds.
I tried to contact a local model to make a quick run out to the woods this afternoon before it was too late, but couldn’t connect before the light was fading and a little rain had started. So it goes.
I might try taking tomorrow’s model to a state park where hunting is prohibited. Of course, that’s no guarantee that a drunken idiot with a shotgun won’t be hunting there anyway. But the odds are better.
So, it looks like I’ll have to settle for as close as I could get with the sun ruining the shot I had in mind. This one of Angie may be as close as I got. What I was really interested in was the color that had stayed in the underbrush long after the leaves were gone from the trees. It seemed to be much more dramatic and much more colorful than I ever remember before. Bare trees with about a 4-6 foot layer of bright color at the bottom. But it was only really at its most beautiful when a heavy overcast made the colors really come out. The sun just washed them away.
But I still like this composition with Angie being all tree-like and lots of interesting shapes and tones and colors going on. Just not what I had set out to capture. But Mother Nature always has something to offer if you are willing to see it.
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