Sharp Dressed Trees

What do you do when a friend calls you to take a walk? You grab your camera.

We walked and gawked for a couple hours at the magnificent fall colors. We went to a spot nearby that I've wanted to shoot for a long time. It's got a one-horse town kind of feel to it. There's a pond, a small waterfall, a (very) old post office building, an abandoned mill, a blacksmith shop and a Congregational church all within feet of each other.

There was some mighty fine reflection going on in the ginormous church windows. My friend was lying on her back, shooting straight up at a fiery orange maple tree while I was off to the side a bit, shooting the windows.

We got a few strange looks. It's a good think neither of us cares about strangers thinking we're strange.

We pulled into a small parking lot near the pond but there was a man sitting there with his dog. Think ZZ Top. I think this guy might have been a band member runaway.

We were a bit hesitant about getting out so we drove up the road a bit to a horse farm I found a couple years ago.

If I didn't know better, I 'd think I was in Kentucky.

Except we don't have any blue grass. Or bourbon distilleries.

Is that where they make bourbon, in a distillery?

Totally fell in love with this white fence.

I need a white fence somewhere in my yard. Oh, I can't wait to tell the Man that one.

Then he's going to give me strange looks.

But isn't that a gorgeous fence?

It was so pretty against the colors of the trees surrounding it, I wanted to hug it.

And here's the view going the other way. Don't you just love the lines of the shadows on the grass?

Really. This fence is just about perfect.

And here it is from the ground view.

Good thing we were on a back country road and there wasn't a whole lot of traffic going by.

But I don't really care. I wanted that shot and decided to stop, drop, and shoot.

After shooting the fence for a while, we meandered our way back to the pond and one-horse town and found that Mr. ZZ Top and his dog had moved along.

All of 500 feet.

Except we didn't know this until we saw him resting on top of a picnic table as we walked along the edge of the pond.

At first we thought it was a pile of clothes somebody left there. But then the pile moved.

That's all it took. We were outta there.

Good thing we snapped a bunch of shots before we started walking along water's edge.

Last shot of the day came from a local cemetery. My friend is shooting a wedding in early November and she was scouting out locations for some formal pictures. She found a simple stone chapel in the cemetery and wanted to show it to me.

If you didn't know you were in a cemetery, you'd think the chapel was in Europe.

When you walk a bit, you come to this maple tree.

We just stopped and stared.