I really love fall because it is a great time to travel and take photographs.  But the hard part about fall is that we do a lot of traveling and take a lot of photographs!  I was already a few weeks behind on processing my photos from the last two weekends, and then this weekend I went and took another 1,000 or so photographs, so I’m even behinder now than I was before.  But we’ll slow down a bit in November and December, so with any luck I’ll have some time to get caught up on my processing and my writing.  Wishful thinking, perhaps, but that’s the plan.

Over the weekend of 10/19-10/21 we headed to Roanoke, VA to spend time with our good friends Steven and Cheryl.  One of the things I had been looking forward to was visiting their Farmer’s Market, which is right downtown, in the Market Square area.  There is a block-long section of street that has been permanently set up for local farmers and craftspeople to display and sell their goods.  It was quite an experience, and for me it was a real photographic treat.  And all I did was shoot vegetables!  I could have make an entire day photographing people, although many of them were not nearly as photogenic as the food. 🙂

I’ve not spent a lot if time at farmer’s markets, although I certainly need to do more of it.  The quality of food for sale is much better than that found at even the better local grocery stores.  Most if it is truly local, and you can be pretty sure that whatever you buy was picked just a few days before you bought it.  We always tell ourselves that we don’t buy enough produce to make it worth the trip, but I think there’s a lot to be said for buying fresh and for buying local.

The fall colors were coming into their own while we were there, and I’ll try to follow up with another post on that subject in the next few days.

I have a number of friends who seem to be able to race home and see who can be the first to process and post photos from their weekends, but I don’t seem to be able to come close to that, so I don’t care to waste much effort trying to compete.  In the mean time I’m currently trying to download and process another batch of photos from our two latest adventures.  One of them was for a paying client today, so I’ll have to give those photos a higher priority.  But I’ll get back to these soon, so stay tuned.

Special thanks to Riverstone Organic Farm from Floyd, VA for allowing me to shoot their vegetables!