I know it’s getting to be autumn here when dry leaves and cedar duff begin to fall on our roof and it feels like I spend more time up on a ladder cleaning the gutters than I do on the ground taking photographs. Blustery winds -- all but absent during the idyllic summer -- begin to blow now and then off the east slopes of the Olympic Mountains, as if Mother Nature is doing warm-up exercises for the coming rainy, sometimes stormy months.
The arc of the sun as it travels from east to west falls lower in the sky with each passing day. This too tells rain-wise Pacific Northwesterners that the monsoon season is about to return. We’ve had a couple of months to dry out umbrellas and patch our rain parkas. Soon the normalcy of rain will mark our days.
The good news, for photographers, is that the light here in the fall is just amazing. I shot the photograph above two mornings ago when I was out for a walk at dawn. The wind was whipping the branches of the willow and even the stately cedar trees so that there was no way I could get everything in the scene in sharp focus, but the moon was incredible. The image below happened yesterday, again at dawn, as the low-in-the-sky sun popped through the trees that surround our house and filtered through a curtain.
There will be more to see in the coming days. Like Mother Nature, I’d better do my warm-up exercises and be ready.
