Quests for Inspiration Episode 1: Fall Forest

My favorite season is Autumn. I love the beautiful colors splashed across all the leaves. I love the gloomy overcast days perfect for snuggling under blankets with a cup of rich hot chocolate letting the joys of story building wash over me. I love the cooler weather that sends bugs back to the abyss from which they came and sends me outside, gripped by the yearning for adventure and safety from the heat I hate.

And so for the first time since early this spring, I felt compelled to go for a nature walk. More than that, I wanted to take some pretty pictures. I consider myself a photographer like I do a painter: I’m not. But I enjoy it, and it tends to awaken something in me. Like some great inspiring beast lumbering through the vast oak forest that is my heart, it’s one of my tricks in the “catalogue of the arts.”

And so I thought I’d share my quest for inspiration with you. Because I’ve found that inspiration is something best sought for when you still feel inspired. Then you can look back at the things you did and let it spark that same feeling in you.

So come along with me and let the beauty of nature awaken the artist in you.

I love being in the middle of a stand of trees with the sky like a bowl above. The gorgeous fall colors are a bonus.

For some reason I have a fascination with fungi in nature. There are so many different kinds and they all look different. The shapes and textures and colors they come in are so unique and bizarre. They’re one of the things that I feel like make our world truly an alien planet.

Like these ones on this dead log, that could have easily been missed because of the leaves. Mushrooms can be shy and elusive, like they’re some kind of folk… Okay, okay, I’ll stop with the mushroom talk.

Something I’ve found quite productive when it comes to worldbuilding is looking at things in nature and scaling it way up to think about that way. For example, this giant looking hollowed out stump that would make a perfect hiding spot for adventurers escaping from some beast or not-so-friendly folk. Using things in real life to look at and describe works wonders for me. If you’re a visionary learner especially, give it a go!

And the top has these wonderful craggy bits that under the right lens could look like some rocky landscape. It also has moss… I also love moss…

This is a better example of what I was talking about. Bringing the camera down low and getting up close and personal with this fallen over tree. The root ball in particular forms a natural cave with all manner of dangling roots and creepy cobwebs and caves and ledges.

I didn’t realize it until awhile later, but the one time I dropped my phone during this session it actually took a picture. And I kind of liked it. If you ignore the slenderman looking abomination in the bottom left it could almost be a representation of life whirling around us and the planet earth spinning in tandem with-

You know what, never mind. I thought it looked cool and I hope it doesn’t make you too dizzy. (Ignore the bottom left!)

I found this really interesting tree in my journey and I had to take pictures of it. The bend is really cool, and I do wonder if it was meant to be a forked tree, and the other fork died or didn’t form correctly. Either way, I thought it was beautiful and unique!

This big rocky outcrop is really awesome. There are more of these to the north but I didn’t go that way for this session. I absolutely love these enormous rocks that burst out of the ground. They’re reminiscent of caves, which I feel quite at home in…

The really cool thing about nature in Autumn is it does the being beautiful part for me, and all I have to do is capture it. Another photo of that interesting tree I found.

I got down in a dried up creek bed (we have since finally gotten some much needed rain) and found this epic tree cave. Creek beds are a great place to find these tree caves and I’ve always loved these. The trees’ roots spread out and grab the banks and you can see up beneath the tree. This one even looks like it has stone steps going up to it from the left there. Like some great kingdom exists under there…

I also found this really awesome tree with all of these awesome ledges on the inner bark. Let’s go in for a closer look…

Doesn’t it look like stairs? And all of the cool designs on the walls… It reminds me of Bruno’s room in the movie Encanto.

On my way back up from the creek bed, I found this… Some may call it an overactive imagination, but I see a tree cradling the fallen tree on the ground. Reaching out to say a final goodbye to a friend. Or he’s leaching the precious nutrients from the corpse of a fallen enemy.

Whichever.

There is a really mossy section further up the trail, but I will only torture you with one photo. It’s a bit thirsty from the lack of rain, so it doesn’t look as plush. I think the reason I’m so in love with moss is a series of books I read as a kid. They’re called the Poppy and Friends books by Avi, and they came out in the late 90s and early 2000s. In fact, just bringing them up makes me want to read them again. They’re a series of children’s fantasy books about a mouse named Poppy and her adventures. There is a scene in one of those books where she finds her way into a forest, and the way the mossy ground is described beneath her toes sounded so magical… so wonderful.

I think things like that really solidify the impact books can have on someone. If a description from a book can make someone fall in love with something, I think that would be the highest honor granted from a reader to an author.

And last but not least, we have a couple of pictures of bark. Tree bark is another thing I love and I could probably do an entire session of just bark, but that would probably get me thrown off the Internet.

And if you made it to the end of the photography session, I just want to say thank you. This blog is an amalgamation of all the things I love. Most of them are related to writing but sometimes I draw those lines in rather unique ways.

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Thank you again for reading, and until next time…

Happy Photographing!