This fall I spent a long weekend on the North Shore of Lake Superior with my brother Roger Nordstrom and his friend Travis Novitsky.  The hope was to catch some autumn colors and the birch and aspen were in full glory.  Travis led us through the woods on dirt roads on the Ojibwa reservation.  We'd drive a little, get out and photograph, then drive a little more and repeat the sequence.

The weather was beautiful.  A weak front had passed through the day before and dropped just enough rain.  The remaining clouds were still drifting by overhead.  So the light was playing with us, sometimes with exciting highlights and shadows and other times with wonderfully soft open shade light.

Of the many shots I took that day this was one of my favorite.  It's not because it's a classic S-curve road through the autumn woods shot but rather because it's not and it still works.  Instead the road makes its way into the woods a little ways and then disappears from site over a little hump in the road.  But what really makes this  image work for me is the fact that you can tell that it curves off towards the left.  For me this creates a strong force that makes me want to walk around the bend and see what's up ahead.  So it's not the actual curve in the road that makes this composition work for me but the implied curve that we can't see.  Having the road enter the frame in the lower right hand corner tilted it away from the vertical and gave it some movement.

I had to be careful with the exposure.  With pools of sunlight and shadow the dynamic range can quickly get out of control.   My concern was highlight clipping in the pools of sunlight. But the camera's light meter nailed the exposure and no exposure compensation was required.  I made sure I had adequate depth of field by shooting at f/11.  The lens was my 24-105mm zoomed almost all the way in at 102mm. 

There weren't any particular post processing challenges.  I basically followed my normal workflow and didn't have to do anything out  of the ordinary.  I did adjust the shadows to remove any color cast that may have been there and this improved the overall color balance of the image a great deal.

The image on paper is very exciting.  It's full of energy and is one of my favorite from the weekend.