Rus in urbe, as the Romans used to say, or something like it: a bit of country in the city. Roaring Brook, not inaptly named, tumbles down from the Moosic mountains and runs through Dunmore en route to the Lackawanna River. Here and there, despite some encroachments of man, it has a fairly pristine look for a hundred yards or so.

Today I was lucky to have a deep blue, clear autumn sky which cast a cool blue light on everything I saw.

On the other side of the brook is a junkyard, and graffiti can be found here and there even in this enclave (figure 2).

There was a viewpoint, looking down through the trees on the southern bank, where one tree trunk split the image of the brook into fierce blue from the sky on one side and gold from sediment and reflected autumn color on the other (figure 3).


Check out the climbing bracket fungi on the central tree in figure 5.

The image in figure 6 as captured was so blue that I decided to desaturate blue by 75%. I do have a polarizer, to answer your question, but alas it was left in a drawer today.

At one point the foliage was so dense and so colorful that it is hard to parse it, the image is so complicated. So I used the magic of Luminar AI’s mystic and glow sliders to blur it, leaving the colors to shine on their own, diminishing the distracting effect of the many barren twigs (figure 7). The color, however, is true to what I saw in one magnificent stand of trees on the other bank.

There is a skeletal tree near the banks of the brook. I can’t imagine it is still alive, and it required the camera to be tilted up to avoid capturing an image of the dumped waste all around it. I tried one image with it rising from a V in the background trees (figure 8) and another giving the trees with their color more prominence by stepping back (figure 9). Whether either is of any value, I leave to you to decide.

Nikon Z 7ii with Nikkor Z 24-200 mm f/4-6.3 lens.
Figure 1: 74 mm, f/8, ISO 200, 1/250s.
Figure 2: 88 mm, f/8, ISO 640, 1/500s.
Figure 3: 86 mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/160s.
Figure 4: 41 mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/250s.
Figure 5: 125 mm, f/8, ISO 640, 1/200s.
Figure 6: 135 mm, f/8, ISO 400, 1/125s.
Figure 7: 104 mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/160s.
Figure 8: 24 mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/160s.
Figure 9: 36 mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/250s.
All cleaned up by DxO; edited with Luminar AI.