Issues → September/October 2009 → Features →
The Leaf Seeker: Jeff Folger
Photographing fall in New England--one tree at a time
by Michael Blanding
Where is peak color? Yankee editor Mel Allen has the answer!
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Vermont's Route 100
It's the church steeple that causes Jeff Folger, a.k.a. Jeff "Foliage," Yankee's compulsive foliage blogger, to spin his red Silverado pickup truck around the town green of Brooklyn, Connecticut. The steeple is an unusual one, with a rectangular base giving way to a mansard-roof cupola covered in copper sheathing. And more to our purpose, it sits smack behind a giant sugar maple, its leaves lit up scarlet on one side.
Folger gets out of the pickup and strides across the green, Canon EOS-1D Mark II in his hands. He stands, he crouches, he swivels the camera to "landscape," then "portrait"; zooms, focuses, walks a few paces to one side, then the other. In the process, he tries every permutation of "subject: church and tree," looking for that one perfect shot that will truly bring alive the spirit of fall foliage in New England.
Today we're not having the best of luck. It's late in the season, and as we drive down to eastern Connecticut from Folger's home in Salem, Massachusetts, the leaves along the highway are muted. That made the scarlet sugar maple all the more of a find. He walks around to the front of the church to examine a second, scraggly little maple, almost completely bare except for a few orange leaves clinging to the top. It's the kind of tree you wouldn't even notice. But zooming in, Folger snaps off a couple of close-ups.
When he pops his SD card into the computer back in the truck, it's clear that he's got the shot. Using a shallow depth of field as he shot the big maple, Folger has focused on the leaves in the foreground, framing the blurry suggestion of the unusual steeple behind them. And there it is: the essence of New England fall in one little rectangle. I've learned the first rule of foliage photography: Just because trees stand still, that doesn't mean you don't have to stalk them. "Most people will see a shot and say 'I'll grab that,'" Jeff tells me, "but a photographer will go explore."
Folger's weekly foliage blog is more than just a catalogue of color around the region; it's a way for him to explore New England through his own unique lens. "Most people don't see the pictures around them all the time. I walk around seeing pictures," he says, popping the card out of the computer. "That doesn't mean it's always like 'Oh my God, there it is!' but it's a matter of seeing possibilities."
The possibility of finding the next great fall shot is what has compelled Folger to shoot, by his count, some 50,000 foliage photographs over the last five autumns. And yet, several times a week, he still saddles up his truck, laptop balanced on his cup holders, GPS on the dash, digital voice recorder dangling from the rear-view mirror. At one point, I ask him if he feels he's obsessed. He thinks a moment before hanging his head and mumbling, "Yeah, I guess so."
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