A Touch of Fall Color

A couple of years ago, I taught one of my Smoky Mountains fall photo workshops. I had been doing fall Smoky Mountains workshops for years and knew when fall usually happened. That year, I got there when fall was usually happened, but it wasn’t happening. It was such a strange fall that the national news covered it as the fall that never came. I thought that would probably be the strangest fall I would experience, but I think this year tops it.

Not only has this fall topped the strange Smoky Mountains fall, but this year has been a strange one as far as weather. In northern Minnesota, we started the year with no snow. We didn’t get snow. It was crazy warm for winter. We had lots of rain in winter in northern Minnesota. Then spring came with record rain totals. Then a tornado warning. Then we went into drought and a record hot September with a record hot Lake Superior. With global warming, this may be a new normal, or maybe it’s just an indication of the crazy weather yet to come. Maybe we should expect much worse.

This fall is a strange one, too. In early September, it seemed like it was going to start early. I have peak fall color in Lutsen in the middle of September as the earliest one that I’ve photographed. It didn’t seem like it would be that early, and I figured this one would be the third week of September. It’s usually the last week of September or the first week of October. This year, it seemed like it was going to come early, but the leaves stopped changing. And then some changed. And others didn’t.

Usually, the maples near Lutsen start changing color first. Then the aspen and birch change later. This year, some aspen and birch changed first and have already lost their leaves. Meanwhile, the maples on the classic drives in Cook County are still green in places and peak in others and in some places they are over. It doesn’t seem like there is any rhyme or reason to how the colors are progressing. In some places, they are terribly muted.

And then just when I think the colors can’t get any better, I stumble across an area that is some of the best fall colors that I’ve seen in the area. It’s so strange to find these little pockets of color hidden among areas that I would have normally given up on when they look as muted and brown as they do.

What makes this a harder for me is that I’m leading a photo workshop this week, and even though I scouted the area before the workshop the variability of the fall has made it extremely hard to plan. I haven’t been able to follow my prior year’s schedules, but luckily I know the area well and have been finding great color in areas where this summer it felt like it was more vibrant green and less dry than other areas in the county.

Regardless of how the conditions may look or how good or bad they are, one thing that I’ve learned from teaching photo workshops is that you have to take advantage of the situation. You have to because a workshop is a defined period of time during which you can’t make an excuse to not go out photographing. You can’t let the weather or conditions get you down, you just have to go do it. By making the best of the conditions in front of you, you’ll end up finding photos that you like. For example, the photos in this newsletter come from the first two days of the workshop.

I find when I open up my eyes to the reality instead of a desire to have the past or a better future that I can more effectively approach what I find in front of me.

This fall has been a lesson that teaches the above.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this issue. I think there is still some fall to see in the Grand Marais area. If you’re interested, I have a guidebook called “Three Days on the North Shore Photography Guide — Fall Edition” that provides a three-day agenda for seeing and photographing the fall color in the Grand Marais area. You can get it at this link.

I’ll see you again in two weeks.