Fall Colour in Community Park North and Billie Johnson Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve

Community Park North sits inside the much larger Billie Johnson Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve. The park is just a ten-minute car ride from my home. I had the day off on Monday to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day. I had planned to ride my Lectric XPremium to the park via Mount Lucas Road, but I had a problem with the speed sensor. By the time I had resolved the issue, it was much later in the day, and I had lost my enthusiasm for making the trip.

When she came home from work, Bhavna heard the disappointment in my voice. She encouraged me to make the drive and walk with her. I was happy that she did. We

I took my Fuji X-T3, XF27mmF2.8, Urth ND64 neutral density filter, and the too-heavy Manfrotto tripod. I also loaded a 24-exposure roll of Kodak Vision3 50D 35mm film into my Minolta XD-11 with the MD Rokkor-X 50mm f/1.7 lens. You won’t see the Kodak Vision3 50D images for at least a month. I’m not even sure I’ll get good results. The low ISO and low light between the tree meant I was shooting from the tripod.

We made our way through Community Park North, loosely following one of the trail paths toward Palmer Lake, a manufactured lake within the nature preserve. The tripod and the neutral density filter were handy for making long-exposure photographs on the lake.

We continued to follow the trail through the trees, around the lake to the area below the Mountain Lakes House.

I explained to Bhavna that until we started the walk, I had felt that I had wasted my day. I was also upset that my attempts to leave my current gig, which is slowly burning me out, to find a new remote work opportunity were not fruitful. There are a lot of job opportunities available, but most are onsite in Manhattan, Jersey City or Philadelphia. I don’t want to waste precious good weather days sitting on a train to get to an office with no windows and nothing except noise.