How To Shoot Fall Colors Like a Pro

Eastern Sierra fall colors October 2021.

Here are some of the things that I do to capture nice Fall shots:

1. If the sun is shining, use a circular polarizer and carefully orient it to cut glare reflecting off of the leaves. It’ll expand the color in your shot, improve saturation, and enable a more accurate and appropriate exposure. It can make the sky a deep shade of blue as well, which looks good alongside the bright leaves.

Oxbow Bend at Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

2. Shoot close/detail shots early to avoid wind, especially if you’re shooting aspen trees.

Aspen leaf close-up.

3. Shoot in RAW format to enable you to adjust white balance of your shots towards warm as appropriate to reproduce the warm yellow, orange and red leaf tones you experience.

Range of colorful aspen

4. Use a small aperture such as f/16 or f/22 for maximum depth of field. With an ultra-wide lens, f/8 or f/9 may provide adequate depth of field if you understand the concept of hyperfocal distance.

Our early October workshops often go here (photo Oct 7, 2010).

5. Arrange your shooting position and time of day so the trees you’re shooting have backlit leaves, which tend to be particularly intense in color.

Backlit aspen, fall 2021.

6. Identify some westward and eastward views and plan ahead to catch sunrise or sunset over colorful trees.

7. Pick up some of the most colorful and interesting leaves you find and put them in your pocket. Arrange them as a still life shot on a rock, or when you come to an interesting object (stump, rock) or stream scene, scatter them around to enhance the color in the shot. In a pool in a large stream or river, sometimes you can find a circulating eddy to throw leaves into to take long exposures with the leaves swirling around.

8. Use a tripod.

9. Get into a dense stand of trees and shoot straight up towards the sky.

10. Try some 10-20 minute night shots under a full moon. You’ll get Fall colros shots with star trails!

11. Shoot a lot of Automatic Exposure Bracketing sequences with 1 1/3 stop to 2 stop spacing. Even if you’re not using HDR postprocessing software yet, you can come back years from now and benefit later from your investment of time shooting today.