click photo to enlarge
The leaves are fast disappearing from the trees leaving them stripped, their "bones" becoming black tracery against the sky. As I walked through the village this afternoon I made a note of those trees that were clinging on to their leaves, reluctant to let them go. One or two silver birches had a few yellow leaves dancing on the northerly wind. The beech trees had more than most, a harmony of brown, orange and yellow, still looking quite full, like a skirt around the lower limbs and trunk. The sycamore leaves have mostly gone, as have those on the hawthorns, but in one or two places they too clung on to a cluster ot two. All the horse chestnuts were bare with wet black trunks and branches. The willows, as ever looked the fullest, perhaps half, maybe more of their leaves gone, but plenty still remaining, making them look like the hirsute in a crowd of ballards!Evidence of the leaf fall was everywhere in the piles of wet, rotting leaves against the kerbs, up the side of buildings and garages, and in drifts on the hedge-row bottoms. The dank sodden piles offered no delight to children, either to hurl in the air or to kick through like a silvan plough. As I stepped over and through them, being careful not to slip, I remembered the crisp, dry banks of fallen plane tree leaves I'd crunched through in London only a fortnight or so ago. Today's photograph is one that I took then, when the earliest fallen brown leaves were still being joined by their green and yellow compatriots.
photograph and text (c) T. Boughen
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 160
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On
