Photo Diary: The Early Days of Autumn

It’s no secret that I am in love with Autumn. And as the season transitions and the leaves begin to change colours, having my usual walks admiring all my favourite colours coming to life is something I’ve been looking forward to for weeks now. Last weekend, I went to my first planned autumn foliage walk at Stormont Estate here in East Belfast. It was cloudy during my visit and early in the season so it is still all predominantly green (and I was also told that most trees here in Belfast are evergreen trees, which means they stay green) but it was still beautiful. It still did not disappoint.

Fallen leaves are a fascination of mine whenever autumn rolls in, it’s crazy.

The estate has a lot of places to go to but I ended up hunting for this boardwalk that I saw before. It was a bit freaky because there were a lot of supersized insects peppered in the walk for children’s educational purposes. The first giant dragon fly I spotted almost gave me a freak. But yeah, expectation setting is key. There weren’t a lot of reds in the mix, and I can barely see amber but it is still a nice walk.

I also am recently working on practicing manual shooting and I’m trying to play with the camera settings so maybe the focus in some of these are not really that good. But I liked these two (above), especially the picture of this mushroom. I swear, one of these days I’ll try to plan a walk dedicated to just mushroom spotting. Imagine the colours! I am not still confident on foraging but finding mushrooms during fall reminds me so much of truffle hunting I used to back in the days when I am still addicted to playing Harvest Moon. I am looking forward to it!

The very reason why I wanted to visit Stormont in the first place was to take photos of my books against the foliage. I was looking for the perfect place around the area when we spotted this bench under this tree in the Dog Park. It was a wee bit dark but the place still looks really cool in my opinion.

I brought three books for this: Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors, The Lonely City: Adventure in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing (which I am currently reading), and Autumn by Ali Smith. Obviously, Autumn is the star of this line-up. Last year, I started my Project Seasonal Quartet – which basically entailed me attempting to read each of Ali’s books in this series in the season it was set in. Obviously I failed to finish it as I only read the first book, which is Autumn. But I am trying to restart it this year. Being a mood reader (and a very slow reader at that) is a pain but setting some goal still makes my reading years exciting.

I wanted to take a photo of the inside of the book and when I opened Autumn in a random page, this quote came on – and it was perfect! “October’s a blink of the eye.” I love instances like this. ❦

This line up of trees (one on each side of the main street going to the Parliament Building) is one of the distinct features of the estate. And I think this is also where the colours of fall are concentrated in this place. It was really beautiful. And I imagine it will be more beautiful as October pass and November kicks in.

I was alone for the most part going to this line up and so I tried setting up a tripod and taking a video of me, with the intention of screen-capping in hopes of getting a good shot. I don’t know what happened but I really do look like I was super imposed in the image. I swear I really was there. 😂

I mean even the video/gif looks like I was edited in for some reason lol. 😂

Even if the weather was a bit gloomy, contrary to the forecast that it’ll be a sunny weekend (classic Belfast weather lol), it was really a great outing for me. Productive as well because I was able to discover this quaint C.S. Lewis-inspired café just right around the corner called The Lamppost Café. (I’ve been here once before but ate outside. It was the first time I was able to go inside and it was so cute! Be sure to visit it if you are ever near the area. )

I really enjoy dressing up and finding places to do these refreshing autumn walks like this. So expect more of this in the next few weeks. ₊˚⊹♡

📍 Stormont Estate
East Belfast, County Down, NI
October 7, 2023

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