Road Trip; Part VI

Birch, Rock and Orange Leaves, New Hampshire (click to enlarge)
X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 55mm; 1/280th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 200

After 7 days in and around Acadia National Park and Mt. Desert Island our time to move on arrived. Our plan was to drive across Maine on Route 3 to Augusta, Route 11 and several other small roads to Route 302 and continue west over to North Conway, New Hampshire. My rule is no interstate highways if I can avoid them.  It was on this cross-Maine route that we saw our first real taste of fall foliage.  It was spotty, but where we did see it, it was intense and grabbed our attention.  Also, it turned out to be a beautiful day for a drive!

North Conway, NH is a typical tourist town with an outlet mall, lots of small retail stores as well as chain store, lots of restaurants and hotels.  Why did I pick North Conway to stay?  It was a Saturday in the autumn in New England and I knew traffic would be heavy with the leaf peepers so I wanted to base our activities for a couple of days in a place where my wife would have plenty to do.  The idea was to stay off the roads, for the most part, for the weekend, then head west on Monday when the weekenders were back at work. Except for some city traffic on Saturday, we had a pleasant two days basing our activities out of North Conway.

On Saturday afternoon, we checked out the area then drove to Cathedral Ledge to watch the rock climbers.  We tried to visit Diana's Baths, which is close by, but it was very crowded and parking along the roadside was at a premium.  We left the hotel early Sunday morning and drove north on Route 16. We wanted to drive to the top of Mt. Washington on its Auto Road.  There is a sign warning potential drivers that if one are afraid of heights, narrow roads with steep dropoffs and no guardrails, don't proceed.  We proceeded anyway.  About halfway to the top of Mt. Washington fog closed in which caused a visibility problem but, on the other hand, we couldn't see how far we would fall if I accidentally drove off the road and careened down the mountainside!  Pros and cons.  Additionally, the paved road ended and we found ourselves driving, for a time, on a somewhat wet dirt and gravel road.  Very interesting drive!

River and Foliage (click to enlarge)
X-T2, 50-140mm f/2.8 len @ 71.5mm; 1/2.3 se. @ f/11; ISO 400

At the top of Mt. Washington it was completely fogged in, cold and a steady 10 mph breeze caused everything to get wet.  It felt like a gentle horizontal rain except the rain was fog.  There were about 50 people at the top, some even taking selfies with nothing but a foggy background.  On the way up the mountain as well as on the way back down, I stopped several times to make some images of what I felt were interesting and colorful subjects, mainly alpine vegetation.  I would refer the images as "intimate landscapes" since one couldn't see more than 50 feet so there was no possibility of the "grand landscape" that would be available on a clear day from high up on a mountain.

After returning to the bottom of the mountain, I found a creek surrounded by trees with colorful leaves, large expanses of water smoothed rock and interesting compositions, so I spent about a half hour or more making several images.  On my way back up to the car, I noticed across Route 16 where I had parked that there were several compositions that included white birch trees, gray, sharp-edged rocks and other trees of various color.  So, across the road I went to spend some time there as well.  I was pleased with some of the images I made and felt fortunate to find them so close to the roadway.

Alpine vegetation, Mt. Washington, New Hampshire (click to enlarge)
X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 21.3mm ; 1/80th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 400

We ended up making a large loop north, west, then south and east back to North Conway that day.  There were parts of that drive that were absolutely gorgeous.  I've never seen leaves as brightly colored as I saw in western Maine and eastern New Hampshire.  It was almost as though someone had plugged them into an electrical outlet and turned on the power.  Some of the leaves looked fluourescent pink!  The reds were spectacular.  They were the brightest reds I have even seen on leaves.  We have nothing to compare to the intense colors in Virginia.  Our reds are much darker and more subtle.  The colors are something I won't forget.

I found an interesting phenomenon when editing my photos of the highly saturated leaves. The leaves were so saturated, the Fuji's X-Trans sensor, set for Provia + RAW and with no additional color added in the menu, couldn't handle the level of saturation as the images came out of the camera. They leaves were just blown out with color, not brightness, and one couldn't see detail in the leaves due to oversaturation. I had to turn the saturation for the reds down a bit to recover detail in the red leaves.  Interesting.  I"ve seen detail lost when using the Nikons in the past when turning up saturation too high, but never have seen it lost right out of the camera.  I can imagine using the Velvia preset would have made it much worse.  

Creek, New Hampshire (click to enlarge)
X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 35.3mm; 10 sec. @ f/11; ISO 400

On Monday, we headed west on the Kancamagus Highway toward Vermont.  Equally beautiful as the day before, we enjoyed the intensely colorful fall foliage at every turn. Monday was a pleasant drive as we had the road to ourselves almost the entire drive.

When we left New Hampshire, we were headed to Woodstock Vermont.  I always wanted to see the quaint little town of Woodstock, based upon its reputation.

One more road trip tome, then back to other topics.  Thanks for coming to my site.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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