Well friends, just like that, another year has come and gone!  As 2025 winds down, so too does my fall image series.  I hope you all have enjoyed seeing these images as much as I have enjoyed creating them and sharing them around.  I thought I’d end this year’s series with a collection of images that predominantly feature trees in their autumn glory.  Some of these pictures were taking in my beloved Smoky Mountains, while some where taken right here in my own yard, as the image above was.  On that particular morning, I was sitting in my kitchen eating breakfast when I noticed that the fog outside seemed to be getting heavier and heavier.  I decided to grab my camera and go look around in the yard to see what images I could find, and I spotted the image above just outside my front door!

Below I’ve shared a number of other images in my Alternative Perspective section; the first and last of which I’d like to call particular attention to.  Immediately below is a composition I credit my friend Sue Milinkovich with.  I don’t know if she was the first to discover it, but she was the one who introduced me to it through her beautiful work.  Every time I see her images of it, I think to myself that I need to go try to capture that tree myself, and this year I finally did it – and managed to capture it at peak to boot!  This is one of those shots that tricks the viewer.  Viewed from any other angle, this tree looks like any other tree, but from this one specific view point it looks super twisted!

The last image in the Alternative Perspectives section is also from here in our backyard.  For the last couple of years, Holly and I have been working to plant a border of wildflowers around our backyard.  For whatever reason the flowers waited to really bloom until the leaves were changing on the trees, which I thought made for a really interesting splash of color.  The tree in the background always has a really neat shape to my eye, and so I walked all around the yard until I found a spot the lined the flowers up with that particular tree.

And that’s it!  That’s the end of my fall color series.  As I mentioned before, I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.  While this concludes this series, I’ve actually got one more post to make this year, and that’s my 5 Favorite Photos post, which will come out in New Years Eve.  I look forward to that post every year, and so I’ll see you all again in a few days!

–Dan Thompson