Autumn's light and mist

Sunlight shone in again when the curtains were drawn this morning. I felt a bit dozy as we'd stayed up far too late again last night. I find it hard to get to bed early when I have had to go to long evening meetings.

When I finally got up, and looked out of my upstairs work room, I thought that it might be the last time I could try to film our rhus tree's flame coloured leaves, which seem ready to drop imminently. I still have the borrowed wide-angle zoom, at least until tonight, so it seemed the optimal time to do yet another landscape shot across the Horns Valley to Thrupp, with Minchinhampton Common on the distant hilltop. The mists were a bonus.

I watched the mists settling down along the main valley last night after I'd returned home, and this morning they were beginning to thin, rise and swirl along the valley bottoms on a very gentle breeze. I do love this view, which is pretty much what I see when I look up from my desktop computer, something I do more and more when the sun is shining and the fields and woodlands are still so colourful.

I took a few shots until a little miaow signified that Bomble was starting to walk out of the window on to the narrow cill beside me, which always makes me panic, as I have a poor head for heights. He of course is the sort of cat that loves to stretch out on a tree limb, preferably high up off the ground, and we often find him sitting on the narrowest of dangerous places. He of course has never come to any harm.

As I looked back through the viewfinder, I didn't notice until too late that the heron I have seen in the back garden recently was flying up the valley, passing just behind the ash tree in the garden where it had perched before. That would have been a good shot against this backdrop. A little later, Helena came out to the garden to check the bird feeders, two of which hang below this rhus tree. I took another picture with her in the frame, but in the end this combination of colour, mists and the landscape appealed to me most.