Here’s a shot from my trip up to Munising, MI to chase after fall colors this year. I managed to drive up at just the right time as the colors were great everywhere I went. One place I visited was the Log Slide Overlook at the Grand Sable Dunes. On my drive in off of the highway, I noticed the road curved back and forth nicely so I decided to try to get a shot of that. Turns out this is one of my most popular photos on 500px so far so I must have done something right?!

Location

I shot this on the small road leading to the Log Slide Overlook near the Grand Sable Dunes. I believe the road is 724. I wasn’t the only person who thought of shooting it. As I was driving out, two other cars kept pulling over to let others pass (including myself) so they could get the road all to themselves. I ended up having to drive up and down the road a couple times to get it to myself. Finally, I had about 30 seconds alone so I snapped a few pictures out of my car window with my 90mm macro lens which is one of the sharpest lens I own albeit a bit slow with autofocus when I use that.

Composition

I’ll admit, other than deciding to shoot the road, I didn’t put a lot of thought into the picture. I literally just put my camera outside my car window and fired of a couple sets of bracketed photos. I ended up just using the darkest exposure of them as it had a little more ‘mood’ to it than the others.

Post Processing

My overall processing time for this photo was quite short compared to most my photos. I bet I only spent an hour or so on it. I had originally shot the photo as a bracketed set of -2,0,+2ev but decided to just use the -2ev photo because it had the least amount of camera shake (due to the faster shutter speed) and also because it was a bit moodier being darker.

At first I did all my edits in Adobe Lightroom. I made an adjustment brush layer for the trees and another for the road. I added quite a bit of saturation and white balance adjustments to the trees to make them a little more ‘fall’ like. This is a dirty secret of most fall color photographers is that they will often cheat in post processing and make the trees more orange. I’m not the exception to this rule as you can see in the before and after.

After that, I brought the photo into Adobe Photoshop. I then added an orton effect to the trees to blur the leaves more as I find having leaves with too much sharpness or clarity is distracting similar to how we use ND filters to smooth out waves in the water.

Another important post processing thing I did was make the center line in the road brighter and have more saturation. I think this is really 50% of the photo is the leading line the road’s center line creates. It leads you into the photo to the nice bright areas of the road and the trees. Ultimately the road, light on the road and trees are why this is my number one photo on 500px right now.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

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