Autumn Inspires | Photos (Part 1) – What lies beneath

Most artists, photographers and general life enthusiasts will find a shared enthusiasm for the enriching visual changes which the season of Autumn brings in its wake. Like the heat from a furnace being blown slowly over the landscapes below, green summer leaves are turned a shade of burnished bronze and cherry red; the once verdant grassy planes become scattered with pepperings, and clusters of fallen leaves, and dropping from trees like a windfall scattering the treasures from a Christmas tree, are apples and acorns, conkers and chestnuts of every conceivable shade of red and brown and orange, and shaped both shiny and smooth, as well as precariously spiky. Of course Autumn isn’t always a pleasure, not least on those gloomy wet and windy days, when the treasures falling from the trees very quickly become a water saturated mush mixed in with a cocktail of mud and rotten leaves, however when the sun shines on Autumn, and those oranges and reds are offset against a cerulean blue sky, the gems of this season truly sparkle.

Last Sunday was one such day, when the sun shone almost strong enough to feel like Summer, and the colours of autumn, though slow to take hold (given that our Spring this year started in around June, we probably can’t expect to see any significant Autumn changes until the end of November at the earliest) started glimmering in the enhanced morning light. Bemoaning all of those times when I have come across little Autumn gems without a camera in my pocket, I rushed out with my partner and my camera in hand to the mid-urban oasis of Wandsworth Common to search for photographic and artistic inspiration within the folds of this freshly unfurling Autumn season.

This post will be one of two in which I share some of the photos taken on that day. Roughly split into themes, my second post will focus more on the images created on the moving surface of Wandsworth Common’s lakes; beautiful abstract compositions reflecting all of the Autumnal colours mirrored in these rippled waters. But today’s post focuses on more solid ground; on the leaves dappled with reds and browns, and on the mushrooms which we scrambled around amongst the undergrowth to find, and which have to be my favourite of all features of the Autumn landscape. They weren’t in fact all that easy to find, and at one point we almost gave up on discovering any. But a little squirrel, scurrying past us with a mushroom in her small furry hands soon alerted us to where the mushrooms were lurking, and the photos which result must surely be dedicated in thanks to that squirrel for showing us the way. Thanks also to that beautiful creature for her own adept posing – my photo of said squirrel nibbling carefully on a mushroom has to be my favourite of the lot.

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