Travel Camera Roll: New Hampshire, October 2023

Since I’ve been doing my camera roll inspo posts, I’ve noticed I often collect larger numbers of photos from travel because the sights are novel to me. The photos may not be great, but they each show some aspect of place that I want to remember, and that I would combined to use if painting that location. So I’ve decided to sequester unused “possible future reference photos” from each trip into its own post.

This one is from a weekend mini-break the White Mountains of New Hampshire to ride the Cog Railway at Mt Washington. I have already painted some scenes from this trip in Photo to Painting: Blue November Edition. I also posted some travel sketches from this trip in The New England Fall Foliage Palette, or, Autumn Palette Mark II. Here are some remaining ones that I thought might be worth painting, but I never got around to it.

Early October was an idyllic time to visit Franconia Notch State Park. The sun was just starting to get golden around 4pm. The visible sun, people on the bridge, etc. make this not an ideal Unsplash photo, but I like the charming bridge, white water in the stream, and contrast between the cool green ferns in the lower left and the yellow-green foliage in the upper right.

At Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire, there is an amazing trail where you walk along a boardwalk with sheer cliffs on either side. The sunlit foliage at the top of the cliffs looked like a halo as we peered up from above, and is shockingly reflected in the shiny rock. I love the rock shapes, too. This is not an Unsplash-able photo because of the random other tourists in the photo. Because you have to walk single file, it’s always crowded.

Same day at Franconia Notch. My phone camera wasn’t quite up to the challenge of getting these colors right, but I was over the moon about the contrast between the very green foliage along the river in the park to the multi-colored fall foliage on the hill over the ridge.

Here is another view of the same situation with more of a focus on the distant foliage, but the foreground greens are much duller.

I took a number of “on the road” photos on this trip; mostly they don’t look good because of the weird artifacts of the windows, window frames, car dash, etc. I especially like this one because of the Golden Hour colors (at 5:46 PM) which illuminated the foliage, the contrast of the foliage with the charming red building, and the foliage-covered distant mountains.

There is a weird strain of my aesthetic sense where I love the juxtaposition between the sublimeness of nature with lowbrow kitsch, such as in my Market Basket scene of November 2024. The Mr. Pizza restaurant sign against the sunset tickled me.

This is more evocative view of the same sunset cloud painted just one minute earlier than the Mr Pizza one. It’s easier to see the mountains and the pink cloud tips. If I were to paint the Mr Pizza scene, I would use this photo for the cloud part.

Another road photo, but I found the sky gradient charming and the low cloud of morning mist was really glorious in real life (but amounts to a very small amount of the photo).

What I love here is the surprising red popping out of the green. The deep blue sky is good here too.

I like the lighting on this foliage.