Rich and I did a quick getaway trip to Callaway Gardens last weekend.  Callaway Gardens is located in Georgia, about an hour southwest of Atlanta.  My photography goal for the trip was fall leaves.   While the peak color is past in places like New England or along the Great Smoky Mountains, the leaves are just now changing in north Georgia.  I kept an eye on the Georgia Leaf Watch website to help time our trip, and I think we hit the peak weekend.  The leaves have been slow to change this year, but they burst into color right before we drove up.  It was fun to walk the nature trails and photograph the fall colors at Callaway Gardens.

The above shot is at “Hummingbird Lake,” which we drove by often during our weekend at Callaway.  Often we can find turtles sitting out on logs, sunning themselves.  Rich thinks the lake should be renamed to Turtle Lake.  I think the name is just fine as it is!

I hadn’t realized just how many evergreen trees are in Georgia.  There were certainly trees with beautiful red and yellow hues, but they didn’t seem to stand out much with all the green around them.

Regular readers of my blog may remember the waterfall that I found at Callaway a few years back.  I got a few nice compliments about my shots, until people noticed how tiny the waterfall really is!  I was hoping to find the waterfall surrounded by red and yellow leaves, but it wasn’t.  There were plenty of brown leaves that accumulated as the winds tossed them from the treetops!  But it was still fun to put on the circular polarizer and dial in the slow shutter speed to play with blurring the water.  This was my favorite shot:

I tried to find bright red and yellow leaves on the ground, but the leaves that I did find weren’t very photogenic.  Then I looked up and noticed a few bright red leaves against a muted green background backlit by the sun.  So I got my leaf isolation shots after all… :)

I’m still going through pictures from the trip, and I’ll share some more in my next blog post.  Until then, happy Friday!!