The Central Coast: The colors just sort of sneak up on you.

It’s a few weeks after Labor Day at our ranch along the central coast of California. 

The air is still hot and dry, and you’re still concerned about fire danger, but there’s the first clue that the weather is about to change: Tarantulas on the move. Skulking about on all eights, you’ll see them on the roads and trails, making their way on their tippy toes, the boys on the lookout for their next girlfriend.

And within a few weeks, right on schedule, the weather cools a bit and you start to see hints of color in places where everything so far this year has been green or shades of brown.

It’s not the dramatic display of colors you would see in the Appalachian mountains or even the Sierra foothills, but it’s just enough to brighten the landscape we’ve been ignoring for the past 6 months or so.

As a person who always has a (real) camera nearby, it’s almost painful to keep driving by these small packets of vibrant yellows and reds without capturing at least something new for that file folder of autumn leaves I’ve got stuffed on a hard drive somewhere.

So I took my (real) camera, which this season is a Mamiya 645 Pro TL film camera, and began to ease that pain. 

What follows is a short portfolio of my pain relief; some fall colors on film.

Photo Factor: This series was shot on a medium format film camera; the Mamiya 645 Pro TL using Kodak Ektachrome 100 film. The film was exposed at box speed and processed by Richard Photo Lab in Santa Clarita.

The 120-sized film images were scanned using an Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner using the Epson Scan 2 application. Scans were set to 3200 dpi and then opened directly with Topaz Photo Studio for sharpening and denoising. The files were then sent to Adobe Lightroom Classic for some final adjustments.