Tips for Shooting Autumn Foliage

 As the autumn season is here and we are quickly approaching winter. This is the perfect time of year to capture some amazing autumn colors in your fall foliage photography. While autumn photography can present its own set of challenges, as we will discuss below, we will look at some photography tips to ensure that you are setting up your photoshoot, while still being able to take amazing high-quality images and videos capturing the beauty of autumn and fall leaves.

Beginners should not fret as there are many tutorials, fall photography tips and amazing products that can help you in your autumn photo journey. There are a plethora of cameras and lenses, drones and other photography products that will not only help you get those fall photos but also advance your skillset as a photographer. As you may be facing overcast days, sunny days and other harsh lighting conditions, there are ways to handle these photography scenes. Cloudy days may present some challenges to getting the right amount of ambient or natural light to hit your camera sensor. Utilizing a long exposure with a slow shutter speed will allow for more light to enter your camera’s sensor.

Let’s explore some of fall photography tips and tutorials which will help you capture amazing high-quality images and videos of fall foliage photography.

Fall Photography
Beginning Steps

Start with getting your hands on a great new DSLR camera, drone and other photogrphy equipment. The advancements in technology in the best DSLR cameras and drone cameras which are gimbal based are perfect for getting amazing fall foliage photos this fall season.

Additionally, you want to have a great lens to pair with your new camera. There are many great lenses available from manufacturers like Canon, Nikon, and others which can fit any shooting environment and scene. These can range from wide angle lenses to telephoto lenses and even zoom lenses. Each will help you achieve the type of photography you are seeking. As each camera manufacturer has their own mounting system, if you choose a lens with a different mounting system than your full frame mirrorless DSLR camera, you will need to get a mounting adapter. Telephoto lenses and zoom lenses will allow you to achieve excellent magnification with extreme clarity for those close-up shots of the fall colors.

As an example, if you are a portrait photographer and you are looking to set up a background scene for your fall photoshoot, you can ensure that the subject of your photoshoot can be seen with sharp clarity and vibrancy with a beautiful backlit skyline. This harkens back to what we discussed regarding choosing the time of day to take your fall photos. Early morning clear blue skies will present the least challenges to getting those great backlighting in your photos, so you may want to try and schedule your photoshoot around that time.

In addition to trying to schedule your photoshoot for the best time of day, you may want to consider taking a trip to see some of the great national parks in Colorado and get some amazing nature photography of higher elevations and waterfalls, giving you a better depth of field view and showing off the autumn colors at the peak of these elevations.

A trip to New England or Minnesota will get you near the gorgeous views around bodies of water. The maple leaves and leaf peepers that you will find in these locations are perfect ways to capture fall foliage photos.

Try taking your fall foliage images during the golden hour. The golden hour is the period during the first hour of light after sunrise, and the last hour of light before sunset. The sky will turn wonderful fall colors to get amazing fall foliage photos during this time. Photos and videos taken during the golden hour will highlight the hue from the sky on the autumn foliage.

Next Imaging Steps

When shooting fall foliage photography, you will want a lens that can handle those bright sunny days. We recommend getting a circular polarizer filter, a neutral density filter also known as an ND filter. This will greatly reduce the amount of light which hits your camera sensor which is great for sunny days. Speaking of those sunny days, a polarizing filter will also get rid of that unwanted glare and undesired reflections when photographing your subject during your fall foliage shoot. Circular polarizer filters also increase color saturation, so your fall photography photos will have those fall colors showing up even more vibrant in your final exposure.

Your DSLR camera or drone camera should have exposure compensation which will allow you to adjust the brightness settings, manually overriding any automatic settings your camera may have set, especially when utilizing a circular polarizer filter.

Regarding stabilization of your camera equipment, we have often found with handheld photography more blur and shake may appear in your exposure. So, ensure that your camera and lens have good stabilization features which help minimize the changes of blur and shake appearing in your exposure. We also recommend having a tripod in your photography equipment to help ensure that there is no shake or blur in your exposure.

Camera Settings

The shutter speed directly correlates to the exposure length, meaning that if you have a slow shutter speed, you will get a long exposure and more light will enter your camera’s sensor.  For example, during overcast days you want to ensure that you utilize a long exposure so you don’t underexpose your photo by not having the right amount of light entering your camera’s sensor.

While shooting in autofocus makes things much easier, especially for beginners as the camera will automatically adjust its settings based off your shooting environment, we do recommend trying to shoot in manual mode. This will give you direct control over camera settings such as the ISO number and white balance to aperture size. This will allow you to control how you want your camera to tackle your photoshoot. Therefore, you can manually adjust the ISO setting for shorter exposures when there is plenty of natural light.

Utilize the Wi-Fi and bluetooth which should be baked into your camera or drone. Pair it with your smartphone and download the post processing app for that manufacturer. You can always utilize post processing software like Adobe Lightroom on your PC or laptop and tablet as well.

Try shooting in the RAW format which allows for additional post processing and as mentioned above utilize your smartphone, tablet, PC or MAC for editing and adjusting your exposure. Once you have settled on the final exposure, you should feel confident enough to post that photo on social media and share with your friends and family.

Final Thoughts

This is a wonderful time of year to advance your photography skills and capture some awe-inspiring images of the fall leaves and autumn colors. Having a top notch DSLR camera, a drone with a gimbal-based camera coupled with the lens of your choosing (based off shooting needs) will ensure that you get amazing autumn photography exposures.

As a landscape photographer, or even a portrait photographer you will be able to  to highlight your subject backlit with wonderful autumn streets covered in fall foliage. Utilize the photography tips and tutorials provided and enjoy your taking great images of fall foliage this Autumn.