In early October of every year, I travel to the tourist mecca of Cleveland, Ohio, to participate in a strategy tournament for a favorite game of mine.  As I did in 2013, in 2014 I took a meandering back-roads route to the Cleve.  This, time, however, I decided to leave in the late afternoon/early evening, to try to expand my horizons a little bit by taking some low-light photographs in the twilight hours.  My journey was thus something of an experiment.

I discovered that my camera, if one exposes the image long enough, can take a very dark twilight scene and make it seem much brighter.  That was the case with all of the images here.  I had anticipated working with a much darker set of images that I actually ended up having.  This wasn’t bad or good, just unexpected, and something I need to take into account in the future—I should take photographs of the same scene at different exposures to get a better sense of what exposure at the same ISO and aperture will produce what level of light.

Anyway, the eight images below (seven different images, but one processed in both color and black and white) are the photographs from this little experimental trip that I thought worth sharing.  It is a tiny little blog entry, so if you don’t like it, it is over quick.

[Remember that you can click on each image below to see a larger, better image.  Also, the EXIF data for each image contains GPS coordinates that you can use to locate the exact place where the photograph was taken.]

October really is the best month of the year.  First, my birthday is in October, so there’s that.  But October is also when you get that first unmistakably fall day that you can really savor and appreciate.  It is not yet too cold, the leaves are turning, and fall and football are both in the air.  October is definitely the best month to be in Ohio.

This is a very pastoral set of photographs; I drove through no towns or villages, just farmland.  How can you not like cows, anyway?  What’s the matter with you?  A cow is the subject of my favorite knock-knock joke:

Knock Knock.

Who’s There?

Interrupting Cow.

Interrupting C–

MOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Here’s a horse munching away on the rolling hills of northeastern Ohio.  You can see the fall foliage starting to turn.  Sometimes it seems as if every single tree is just a slightly different color at this stage of fall.

More cows.  Gary Larsen loves this blog, I am told.  I like the tone I chose for this black and white photograph, but I don’t use it very often, because you have to have the right scene for it.

Here’s a more traditional tone for one of my black-and-white images.  More cows still, in the back center.  I am not sure why, but I really enjoy this scene—it may be the dynamic nature of the clouds contrasted with the very placid hillside pastoral scene.  Below is the same shot, but in color.

I really couldn’t make up my mind which one I liked better so I wimped out and included them both.  With this second version, I really like the blue-green divide.

Well, I showed cows and horses, so I suppose some sheep were inevitable.

Nothing dramatic here, just a staring contest between me and the sheep.  As soon as I leave, they go back to playing cards.

One final image; a lone barn set against a denuded hill.