In 2010, I didn’t have enough photos to do a Fall Colours essay, requiring me to suspend what had become an annual tradition: this gap was caused by the colours not coming out until very late, after the end of the Celtic Colours festival, and the weather being too poor for photography when they did finally turn. I am happy to say that this situation did not occur this year, whose weather was easily the best for Celtic Colours since 2006. This year’s colours were generally spectacular, especially in the back country, with abundant reds and, most times, there was enough sun to make them dazzling. Although I did not take close to the number of photos in past years (only 1230 in total during my October trip, of which 583 survived as initial candidates for this essay), I did get what I judge to be some fine shots and so had no problem in finding material for this essay. Indeed, the opposite problem was resolved by extending the essay from 30 to 45 pages! I apologize for the lateness of this essay, but I have been working on it diligently since I returned home — it is much longer than usual.
This essay’s photos are mostly presented in the order in which I visited the places from which they were taken; in two cases, I have grouped photos together that were taken from several different locations. All four of Cape Breton’s counties are represented, though the vast majority of the photos this year are from Inverness and Victoria Counties (22 and 19 pages, respectively, out of 45). I had hoped to see more of Eastern Cape Breton than I did, particularly the gorgeous Atlantic coast in Richmond and Cape Breton Counties, but I cancelled the trip I had planned there because the day I had free for it was too overcast to produce the photos I had hoped to get. Still, I did manage to see a good deal of the island, in no small part because Celtic Colours concerts are held all over the island, in small as well as larger communities, the travel to and from which afforded me opportunities to get photos along the way.
The photos in this essay are not all of leaves, though you will certainly see more than a few of those. But, in each photo, you will see the fall colours in the grasses and on the hillsides; if you look closely, you will see that nearly every one could only have been taken in the autumn, though sometimes the seasonal changes are subtle. Most of them come from places that have appeared in previous essays; a few are from newly discovered vantage points—Cape Breton still has many roads and trails I have not not yet explored!
Recent essays have included numerous “inset” pictures of a smaller size than the larger “main” photo at the top of the page; text was made to flow around these photos. This works reasonably well, other than robbing the inset photos of some detail, though with certain screen sizes, particularly very small ones, flowed text is often poorly formatted because there isn’t enough room for both it and the photo, and, worse, often appears at some distance away from the photo under discussion, rendering the relative references to the various photos in the text (e.g., “the photo at the left”, “the photo above”) sometimes ambiguous and sometimes flatly incorrect. In this essay, I am trying an experiment: I have made all of the photos on a page the same size as that of a main photo. I realize that this will adversely affect the amount of time each page will take to load on dial-up and slow broadband, but, hopefully, the significantly better detail and reliable formatting will compensate for the additional time. However, it leaves me with two problems: (1) where do I put the essay’s text in relation to the photos and (2) how do I refer to the individual photos? I have resolved the second problem by adding a bracketed number at the start of each photo’s caption: [#1] identifies the main photo, [#2] marks the second photo on the page, and so forth, and I then refer to them as photo #1, photo #2, etc. The first problem is a thornier one to deal with. I always start the text for a page beneath the main photo; when there are only two photos on a page, this works quite well. When there are more than two, I have tried to get the text as close to the relevant photo(s) as practical in order to minimize the amount of scrolling required. This necessarily requires the text to be broken into chunks; whenever the text is discontinuous, I have added the tag “[continued below]” beneath a non-final text chunk to indicate that more text follows. I’d be very interested in your reäctions to this changed presentation and any suggestions you might have for improving it if you find it problematic in some way.
To read the essay in sequence, click the “First” link in the navigation bar above and the “Next” link in each subsequent page’s navigation bar. Click the “Essay Index” link in the navigation bar above to see thumbnails of all of the photos appearing at the top of a page in the essay. You may return to the introduction by clicking the “Fall Colours—2011 Edition” link at the top of this or any subsequent page.
I hope you will enjoy the photos I have selected and the accompanying text. Feedback, including corrections, is always welcome; it may be sent either to this site’s web master or to the essay’s author.
Victor Maurice Faubert
2011 November 10
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Note 1: If you are unfamiliar with the place names mentioned in this essay, a list of map resources is given here. Of these, the best computer-readable map of Cape Breton Island that I currently know about is the Cape Breton Travel Map, available as a free PDF file from the Destination Cape Breton web site; I strongly urge you to download it. This map scales nicely, allowing you to zoom in on an area of interest, has a very helpful place name index, and provides a level of detail, both of back roads and streams, that is quite good.
Note 2: See the description here for the notation I use for GPS (Global Positioning System) coördinates, which are those I wrote down when I took the photos.
Previous essays in this series are archived here.