I love paths! Apart from their obvious function as a means of getting from one place to another, paths often have a certain beauty and magic all of their own.

Take the photo on the right for example. The photo was taken at a nature preserve in Illinois in 2022. The pathway leading through the forest has a certain beauty of its own in the way the path curves as it moves along. But in  addition, the trees have very interesting shapes and textures. Their arching over the path to form a sort-of-tunnel makes it very intriguing - there is even an air of mystery waiting to be explored as one walks along this path!

  The same sort of dynamics exist with the photo on the left taken in Autumn at another nature preserve in Wisconsin. Here, the path is accentuated with beautiful curves that lead the eye into the distance. Photos of paths like this cause one to wonder what is round the bend, what lies just out of sight. In addition to the grays of the path itself, this time of the year has a rich range of colors - the browns of the leaves, the greens and yellow of the grasses, the dark vertical lines of the tree trunks and branches.

The golden colors of the leaves in the forest in the photo below accentuate the season. The sun shining through forming a pool of light in the middle distance makes for an interesting contrast with the darker, moodier foreground. Once more the lovely splashes of colors are pleasing to behold - various shades of green, smatterings of red leaves, and the gold of the leaves glistening in  the sun. I always take my tripod in circumstances like this. The tripod forces me to take my time and get the composition right. The dark areas of the image call for longer exposure times - again a tripod helps by holding the camera steady.

This photo is included to remind ourselves of the obvious - paths take us places, and some of those places are beautiful. This photo was taken early one misty morning in Summer. As a vlogger I follow once remarked: "If you want to take beautiful pictures, you've got to stand in front of something beautiful"! Paths enable us to do just that.