I picked a very old gallery to look at for today and am coming up completely empty on any specific reason or goal I may have had in mind for this walk. It wouldn't be terribly unusual at this time to have had no specific goal, except to spend time outside and try to take pictures of "fall" or something. I do think there were a few things that I found on this walk that have become repeated goals in autumnal trots, though.
This photo is the first mild-wide shot of anenome flowers in front of blue sky that I think I may have taken. Through a 21mm lens (APS-C), the added context of the other flowers in and out of focus give this image a lot of depth and do a pretty good job actually conveying to the viewer what a thicket of anenome actually looks like.
While not at all my first recording of a butterfly on verbena, this was an early example of getting one in good critical focus with a non-macro wide lens (the 21 again). I have found that butterflies can be surprisingly tolerant of a photographer as long as you move smoothly and tend to stay near the animal but not too close. How I managed to do that with a wide-angle lens, I don't know, but successes like this one kept me trying at it.
Every time I go to Brookside Gardens now, I look for green tree frogs under the sidewalk illumination lamps near the visitor center. These frogs tend to wander up underneath, presumably to take advantage of warmth and of shade during the day, with the bonus of these lights likely attracting bugs once they light up in the evening. That's an observationally-supported guess, based on how much spider web I've found under all of the lamps this fall. If the spiders are able to support themselves there, the frogs surely also knew it was a safe place to hide and eat. This photo is through a 14mm lens, so as little as the cabbagewhite in the previous photo cared about my proximity, this frog cared even less... or it believed it was camouflaged adequately, I guess.
Finally, this wasn't a first, but it was pretty and it demonstrates a relative rarity in the wild: non-purple echinacea flowers. I believe there's only one species that blooms yellow naturally, though there are domestic cultivars that come in several colors (including a kind of gross-looking greenish petal color). These red flowers are well represented in garden collections around here, but rare in large, wild planters and don't seem to do much to escape cultivation and establish themselves.
