Category : Connecticut

Connecticut is small enough to drive across in two hours and it contains four distinct photographic landscapes. The Long Island Sound shore is sheltered, shallow and — unusually — south-facing, which means the sun crosses the water all day rather than setting into it. The tidal rivers that run inland from it carry sediment, so their water is brown-green and dark rather than blue, which turns out to matter. The central valley has traprock ridges: steep basalt ridgelines standing several hundred feet above gentle farmland, close enough to fill a frame and steep enough to end an afternoon forty minutes before a sunset table says it should.

And the hills are New England deciduous woodland, with stone walls built from the rocks cleared out of these fields two centuries ago.

Two things run through all of it. The first is that the calendar matters here more than anywhere in the western half of this guide, because half the canopy disappears between November and May — the same site is a green enclosure in July, a wall of scarlet in the third week of October, and an open hill with the longest sightlines of its year in January.

The second is that species diversity makes autumn here genuinely different: sugar maple turns scarlet, red maple crimson, birch and hickory yellow, and oak a russet that holds after the rest has fallen, so the colour arrives over two or three weeks rather than one. Each guide below names the shade, the hour, the exposure decision and the covered alternative, and says where the shade is not. We have not photographed at every venue here, and where we have not, we say so.