I seem to be on a sunset & sunrise kick lately but they don’t ever really get old to me. I shot this on Route 70 out in Clayton North Carolina. As the brown death of late fall spreads across the country side I’ve been noticing a very green field that has grown in stark contrast to the surrounding trees and farms. I also noticed some very curious cows, well at least curious to those of use who aren’t cow aficionados. I’m very accustomed to the short haired spotted variety but these beasts remind me more of of buffalo with furry long brown hair covering their bodies. I thought I might catch one of these in the front for a nice foreground to add some depth to a wide landscape shot but unfortunately as much as it appears they liked the green grass it wasn’t enough to stick around as I pulled out my tripod and prepared for the shot. I don’t think I look too much like a predator but as you can see from the shot they all ended up in the back of the field melding into the landscape.

I visited Clemmons Education Forest last week hoping to catch the last of the fall colors and leaves at the park and maybe my last visit there for the year. This is a great local park but unfortunately it’s closed during the winter months (starting in mid November). But between you and me I think I might do some stealth hiking this winter at the park

On a previous post I showed a shot of the inside workings of Yates Mill in Raleigh North Carolina (USA). Yates Mill dates back to the 1700s and is the oldest still functional mill in North Carolina (and I would guess probably one of the oldest in the country). As promised this is an outside shot from the other side of Yates “Pond”. This was a couple weeks before fall colors really took off but there was a hint of change starting. I was going for the water\mirror affect and I was pretty happy with the results although I was hoping to return during the peak of fall colors for an even more dramatic affect but my schedule didn’t work out that way.

As much as I would love to shoot snow topped mountains, vistas overlooking endless views of old growth forests, or thousand year old Inca ruins I have to work with what I have. They say you should shoot what you love but unless you have no kids and an endless travel budget you have to shoot whats around you and I live in central North Carolina, just south of Raleigh, so unfortunately I don’t have any backyard views that belongs on a post card or the cover of National Geographic. What I do have is miles upon miles of farm land surrounding me and on most weekends I head out early in the morning looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, trying to find interesting shots that normally I’d drive right by without a second thought (doesn’t photography have that strange affect where you notice things that you wouldn’t normally notice?). My interest lately has been abandoned farms and in North Carolina you usually don’t have to drive to far to find one. This picture above was taken last weekend. I had scouted it a few weeks before and I was hoping to catch a sunrise breaking through some of the broken boards one morning but once I got there the angles weren’t quite right so I had to settle for some pretty colors in the sky. It rests on some land in front of a new community hospital that is for sale and will likely be the parking lot of some TGIF or related commercial business in the next couple years. For now it’s just an old barn in a field that I didn’t have to jump any fences or fear the wrath of a farmer to spend a sunrise with.