South Shore Leaf Peeping

As fall foliage season peaks, we hit the South Shore again to see what was what....

There are disadvantages to working this turf. In a county where the tallest place is Manomet, we're not going to get those panoramic mountain valley shots where you can see 10,000 trees. Sorry 'bout that. I tend to aim at one tree, often- as you can see above- one that is in someone's yard. If you're upset about the lack of sweeping ROY G BIV vistas, take some comfort at the fact that A) many of these pictures are taken while the person inside the house is loading a shotgun nd saying, perhaps to no one but themselves, "I'll find out why thaat stony looking dude is parked in front of my house," and B) my number is going to come up at the deli some day, perhaps even some day soon. I worry not about stuff like that... "The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast."

Whoever owns this house can do a fall foliage drive just by idling their car in the driveway. Added bonus: basketball hoop. Nothing says "suburban white kid" like one of those not-planted-in-concrete basketball hoops. Ally McBeal could tear down that backboard if she dunked on it. Imagine if Shaq threw down on that? He might snatch it up by the pole after and beat you with it, just for not having the planted-in-concrete type of basketball hoop. Your author here is a tall man, and he sometimes wastes a tangent on stuff that only 6'5"+ people care about.

Orange is the essential fall foliage color. Red and yellow can be found in spring or summer, in the form of roses, glads, marigolds, what have you... but you're not getting orange until Autumn. With the prominent place in Autumn/Halloween ascribed to the pumpkin, orange sort of wins in a rout.  

Since you asked, our road trip this time went 1) Bourne, 2) Plymouth, 3) Kingston, 4) Duxbury, 5) Marshfield, 6) Pembroke, 7) Norwell, 8) Hanover, 9) Rockland, 10) Hingham, back to 11) Bourne.

The good Lord works in many a strange and wondrous way, and even a non-drinker knows better than to cross the Great Spirit when He pretty much smacks you in the face with a suggestion. A pre-noon Mudslide or two never hurt anyone.

Not a lot of people know this.... but when you're drinking and driving, the way to keep safe is to introduce a second negative integer into the equation. Shooting a camera while driving counts as a negative. Two negatives will, uhm, negate the negative charge of each other into a positive. The mathematics work

You know that the green trees are all jealous...

"Foliage and fenced-in meadows" go together like "F5 Tornado and trailer park."

This tree, normally yellow, wore pink in October to raise awareness for breast cancer.

This tree cares not for the affairs of wood-burning humans.

I got the house level in this shot, but the street was, like, on  hill or something.

Lake shots are as close as n EMass shutterbug can get to Vermont-style views. My camera and skills hold me back personally, but I didn't see any overly colorful horizon foliage.

Ignore the times and dates on the shots, my camera changes the time/date every time I turn it on and off. I took these last Friday or so. I did the South Coast on Saturday. The Cape is coming soon.

Not many places have less foliage than sand/scrub/pine-dominated  Duxbury Beach. I had to jump a fence and stomp on some beach grass to get this color.

The one below came easier:

Check back for South Coast and Cape Cod!

Early Season Leaf Peeping In Plymouth County

It's about two weeks too early, but we took to the streets to see what sort of early fall foliage we could find in Plymouth County.

Southeastern Massachusetts may be the weakest spot in New England for leaf peeping, but New England has the bar set pretty high.

One of the benefits of having a blurry camera is that, if you don't enjoy fall foliage, you can just squint at this picture and pretend that the article is about forest fires.

As you can see, we'll be working in the ROY part of the ROY G BIV color spectrum. I looked pretty hard for a purple tree without success. I may have seen a Magenta tree, I'm not sure.... never had that crayon.

Our basic route for this trip was Bourne to Wareham to Plymouth to Kingston to Plympton to Halifax to Bridgewater to Hanson to Pembroke to Duxbury back to Bourne.

I went down Route 106 after a huge yellow tree in Plympton, but it hadn't peaked yet. This tree in Halifax was up earlier.

I needed orange in my life badly enough to shoot the tree with wires in front of it.

Otherwise, a shutterbug develops  tendency to invite themselves into people's yards without permission to seek better shots. I haven't been beaten up or shot at yet, but it's only a matter of time. I have already forgiven my future assailant.

Fortunately, one of the benefits of  working with a crappy camera is that shooting out the window of a car going 50 MPH doesn't really lower the quality that much when compared to my stand-still work.

Neither of my MVP trees (the giant yellow one in Plympton and a deep red one next to the Middleboro 4H building) were at peak when I drove by.

I should really learn which types of tree are birch, cedar, maple, forsythia etc.... I only know maple leafs because they have a hockey team.

I shoot 100 pics or so, then go through them at the end of the trip. Memory issues come up, and you get captions like "I think this is Kingston."

No foliage here, but I love reflective work.

Don't let the week-old dates deter you on the pictures from Leaf Peeping. My camera calendar is  week slow.

Pine dominates our tree shots, preventing us (along with my camera) from getting those panoramic Vermont calendar shots.

Be sure to tune back in....

Because we'll be doing more of the South Shore....

And we'll also do the South Coast...

As well as Cape Cod!

I'll even drag Jessica along, as she takes better pictures than I do.

See you on the road!

Sunday Drive Homework Assignment: Cape Cod Fall Foliage Picture Contest!

We had planned to get our bad selves out on the Cape for the end of the foliage season, but we are having some trouble with the Cranmobile. Unless we commandeer the CCRTA bus, we won't personally be shooting up the Cape with our cameras.

This is a shame, because Cape Cod has a stranglehold on the tail end of New England's fall foliage season. People who have been putting off their leaf-peeping for reasons good or bad have no real options left on the table.

Many people think of Cape Cod as being entirely made of sand, therefore being unaware of the Peep Options down here in Barnstable County.

We'd like to help promote Cape Cod's foliage season, which is where you come in!

Many of you Cape Codders will be out on the roads today. You will be driving through the heart of the local fall foliage. Many of you enjoy the benefits of flash photography.

Why not work towards a Greater Good?

Send us some pictures. If you can leave them in the comments section, feel free. If not, leave them in the comments section of whatever Facebook post you saw this contest advertised at. If worst comes to worst, hit us up at Monponsett@aol.com.

Be sure to tell us what town your picture is from.

Plymouth and Wareham can play, but they have to punch their way in.

We'll choose the best of the bunch, and reward the winner with some useless accumulata swag that we have kicking around. They'll also own Cape Cod bragging rights, which may get you a free beer in the right establishments.

We'll use the picture once. You own it after that. If someone tries to pay us for it after, we'll refer them to you.

The judges are me (Stephen), Jessica, and this guy we know called Cranberry Jones.

We'll take entries for a few days, and then the article will drop like the leaves themselves once the judges are satisfied.

Good luck!

Late-Season South Shore Foliage

We did a few Foliage trips around the South Shore last week.

"South Shore" is sort of an indiscriminate term, as places like Middleboro and Wareham really shouldn't count, but we didn't get Fall Riverish enough to call it a South Coast/South Shore crossover.

That fact doesn't really matter much- especially in an article about leafs on a tree- but it matters a lot to the people who it matters to.

We try to keep moving when we work...

Sometimes we shoot out the window. Worry not, the driver isn't shooting. He drives, the passenger spots and shoots. The driver determines the general direction that we go, while the spotter is in charge of when we stop. 

Maybe you work differently... or maybe I'm too lazy to crop the dashboard out of this pic, and decided to joke around it. 

We let our daily business dictate our photo work a lot, so we sort of ran a Wareham-Carver-Plymouth-Kingston-Duxbury back down to Bourne route.

We've been meaning to do Cape Cod, as we veteran leaf peepers feel that Cape Cod doesn't peak before November. Unfortunately, the Cranberry Chevy has been running poorly recently, it's an expensive fix, and we may have to be Innovative. We may even have a contest.

I'll worry about that later, as it is very late at night and I have pictures to share with you.

I like writing in the middle of the night. The night helps me focus. 

I'm pretty sure that I waltzed out of Duxbury High School in the 1980s just a few years before stuff like Asperger Syndrome and ADHD became the go-to diagnosis model for American school psychologists. If I was a 1970s birth, I'd be full of Ritalin and asleep right now.

I tend to be distracted during the day. Even in the relative isolation that I managed to carve out for myself, stuff- people walking around, approaching vehicles, the discharge of a rife now and then- happens on my street that I have to pay attention to.

That's not the case during the Witching Hour. The darkness obscures all visual distractions, reducing me to Tyrannosaurus Rex-style motion detector status. Anything moving around in my yard at this hour is most likely something that I might have to kill, probably with my hands (I support America's gun rights 101%, but I'm a bit too clutzy/nutty to responsibly own a firearm myself). That sort of tension adds a nice edge to my work.

Hey, you try writing about leaves... 

I've said it before, but Southeastern Massachusetts is tough for shooting Foliage. We lack the elevated spots that you get in places like New Hampshire, where you get those sweeping mountain valley views that you see in the calendars. We sometimes have to leave some dude's truck in the picture.

I'd shoot off of the Bourne or Sagamore Bridge, but that area is cursed with scrub pine. You get a greenish/orangey/semi-brown mix shooting from up there, sort of a bronzed Aquaman.

I have plans for that region, which we will get to in a future article.

Our responsibility runs out at the Rhode Island border. We love Rhodey. We're just a Massachusetts thing.

Even then, we stick to the Eastern part of the state. It simplifies things. 

Shoot, we could give you Colorado pictures if you want, but I don't think that they grow cranberries out there.

It's best if we stay in Massachusetts.

We do have good foliage down here. It's more of a rural driving expedition thing than a hiking thing, although you can see some nice Leaf if you go deep in the forest. You even get Early Peak in the areas of the forest where the sun doesn't shine that brightly.

We'd also recommend using an online map service to plan your trip. You can work a few lakes into your route (we didn't do so on this trip, but you can), and be sure to keep it Rural.

Orange was the hardest color for us to find. Various shades of red are everywhere, with a slow fade to brown taking over as the Fall part of autumn starts to assert herself. Yellow is second easiest, and orange is the hardest.

I see Blue in some Vermont photos, but I'm not a savvy enough Leafpeeper to know what trees do that or why we don't have them here.

We'll try to expand our reach into the northern states next year.  We got to Maine in September, but it was pre-peak. After that, we were lucky to get out of Plymouth County. Busy month,,,

We do perform an important service here. We get it out on the Internet that southeastern Massachusetts, and especially Cape Cod, still has peak foliage.

If you live in or are visiting New England, it is quite simply Too Damn Late for you to see peak foliage unless you get your bad self down to southeastern Massachusetts. You could go to Vermont, but it's brown and desolate up there... and everyone smells like syrup.

We don't want you to have to go through all that, when you can dip an hour or two south of Boston and see perfect late-season fall foliage.

Even with our best efforts, we tend to be more Suburban than Rural. This is why we have to zoom in on tress so closely,when panning back or whatever they call that may be more what the shot calls for.

It also gives us the Flood o' Color that we love so much. It is very colorful down here. I didn't have to edit these shots at all, which wasn't the case with our previous foliage work. 

This is good, because my mouse has no Right Click button now. Not being able to scoot down to Radio Shack is one of the downsides of working the Werewolf Shift, but it is a condition that I tolerate.

I swear that, when I went to the other side of the tree to shoot it without the guy/s house in the background, the color wasn't as satisfying. Therefore, he suffers so that you can zone out on some Reds.

If homeboy objects we'll remove the picture or crop his house out of it or something.

We like our readers to be happy. Sure, we'll fight with them on Facebook now and then, but it's all in good fun.

I tried and failed to frame the Myles Standish Monument between two trees with my cheapo Wal-Mart camera that was last seen being hit directly by a wave during our nor'easter coverage a few weeks ago.

I could have zoomed in more, but it might have made the picture blurry.

I am very much a photographer of the Take Fifty To Use Ten variety.

We have two or three more articles on Foliage coming up

1) A piece where we discuss lining the Cape Cod Canal with foliage-friendly trees in a crazed attempt to make it a 2075 AD tourist attraction.

2) A contest where we troll Facebook for people to take Cape Cod foliage pics which we will publish. A cheapo prize will go to the winner.

3) The article with the results of the contest.

We loved this month, because the nor'easter didn't kill the foliage. It did damage, but it didn't bring about a premature end of the season.

Check this tree below, which lost her leaves directly under her. Raking the yard under this tree is a breeze...

... unless, of course, there's a breeze!

Peep ya later!