The fall season has many facets to it that lend themselves to our photographic interpretation.   From bird migration to grand landscapes, this season is a photographers dream.  The one aspect of fall photography that is sometimes overlooked is macro-photography.  The intimate details of autumn are special and worthy of our attention.

All of the images below were created with my trusty Nikon 105 Micro lens except the first image of Sumac.  I used my 75-300mm limited macro set at 220mm for that shot.   The use of my 105 for the remaining images was done because my image backgrounds were not much of an issue.  A short telephoto like a 105 does show a lot of the background in any image that is not tight on the central subject.  A shorter lens than 105mm would show still more.  Therefore as you instead increase the focal length of the lens that you choose, you narrow down the background.  That was the purpose of my use of 220mm with the sumac.  I wanted the narrow down a busy background.  I have used my 500mm wildlife lens for this purpose.  I add extension tubes to that lens to allow a closer focusing distance.

In my region of North American the Sugar and Red Maples rule the world of fall landscape photography.  Alone or mixed with other hardwoods they make images that would have otherwise been weak, into strong ones.  Despite that, when you get up really close, almost every species including other maples become fascinating.  In days of old I would easily use up an entire day shooting only super close-ups of autumn leaves.

The edge of things in nature provides us with many of the subjects that we photograph. The edge of light is one great example, but so is the edge of the season.  As fall slowly reaches out to winter, you will find leaves covered with snow or frost.  Such was the case below.

Through all of these years of talking or writing about nature photography, if I have done anything that would be of service to other photographers it would have to be to help open up minds to the limitless number of subjects that exist in the natural world.   Each of those subjects can be visually interpreted in many different ways.  Coaxing landscape photographers to create macros or to photograph wildlife, or teaching wildlife photographers the difference between taking scenic’s and creating landscapes has been a pure joy.  The walls we build in life and in photography are really only in our minds.