Early October in New Hampshire is the height of the tourist wave here and prime foliage photography time. Tour buses, people wandering onto the highway, stopping anywhere to photograph the wild colors that come for a short time each year. I also make the mistake of pitching brands shoot ideas during this time. Well, it wasn’t a mistake, just a difficult time to coordinate peak colors-good weather and fish in the net. This year it worked out nicely on the Androscoggin River for Poncho Clothing. Dom L. and I managed to catch the just past peak foliage window a day before the season for Trout ended. Thanks to some “pre-scouting” by Dom we found a handful of fish and plenty of trees to illustrate the wildly colorful New Hampshire autumn season. The fickle New England weather worked in our favor for most of the day giving enough sunshine to get the brilliant bright yellows backlit along the water.
The beauty of New Hampshire in Autumn is that with a short one hour drive you can chase the peak colors early in the fall and continue to chase it further south to get a few more days of peak foliage for photography projects. The other option is to go into the mountains where the leaves change the soonist but as you go up in elevation the mix of hardwoods, and colors, turns to mostly spruce and firs, always green. The challenge with the fly fishing work is that Oct 15th the rivers close to fishing so theirs no window beyond that for pretty trout and leaves. our eyes turn to Pike fishing at that point, big teeth and gray, gloomy days. Fun, but not nearly as colorful as early October chasing trout in the rivers of New Hampshire and Maine.