10. November 2024

The colourful beech forests

It was finally fall again! In contrast to last year, this year we had mostly beautiful weather, lots of sun, fog and little wind at the time when the leaves were changing color. That's a good mix for autumn forest photography 😀

 

This year, I didn't spend as much time photographing heathland or the usual Belgian moorland or river areas. Instead, Christina, Ben and I have been out and about in beech forests, here in NRW and in the Netherlands.

 

Unfortunately, many of the forests you explore in this area are not really photogenic - they are not old and natural enough for that. Unfortunately, I don't live in the Vulkaneifel, MeckPomm, the Kellerwald or the Rhön 😅

 

And yet there are a few small patches of forest here in western germany that are definitely photogenic 😀 I like to look for such places on Google Maps. Here you can see quite well whether there are older beech stands.

 

The only thing you can't tell from a bird's eye view is what the deciduous soil looks like. The forests are often somewhat overgrown with bushes or appear too restless due to the many chaotically arranged and broken branches. But this time there was always something beautiful to photograph.

 

It was also interesting to see how different the autumn colors are in the beech forests. In a beautiful forest here on the edge of the Bergisches Land, most of the beech trees were still green today (November 10th). In other forests in the area, there were hardly any leaves left on the branches on October 27th and the peak had clearly already been missed. I think it's not just the geographical location, altitude and microclimate that play a role here, but probably also the soil conditions...

 

In recent years, I've often been out and about in late autumn when everything is orange - this year we were mostly out and about in a really good phase; when the forest still shows the entire colours from green to yellow to orange, I really like that.

 

The best thing about autumn: it's not quite over yet 😀On the one hand, there are still isolated patches of forest with beautiful autumn colors, and on the other hand, you can usually photograph autumnal landscape details well into December anyway.

 

I hope you enjoy the pictures 👋

 

Best regards,
Thomas

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I hope you enjoyed the series!

 

Many gretings ,
Thomas