The Sweetgum Tree

[Julie Kenward]

The sweetgum trees at some of my local parks are wildly producing their little seed balls. My friend at work has one of these trees in his yard and he cusses at it every time he has to mow over these things. I have to admit, I'm glad I don't have to mow around them but I sure do love their yellow and green leaves in the autumn. They put on one beautiful show!

Canon 40D, EF 70-200mm f/4L
f4 @ 1/250th, ISO 200
Manual mode, pattern metering, handheld
Fill flash used to balance the shade under the tree limbs

[Ken Childs]

Hi Jules, as a kid I used to love these trees! We'd play with the seed pods and pretend they were little maces. I really like the 3 leaf pattern on this and the BG look great!
There are 2 things I'd like to see that could improve this shot, IMHO. A tiny bit more room on the top so that leaf wasn't clipped and slightly toning down the leaf near the center left. :)

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Jules. Ken took the words out of my mouth re the critique! Very nice DOF for f/4. :) We don't have these cool trees up here in the north country.

[Julie Kenward]

Ken, I'll look and see if I have more room up top - I'm kind of thinking that either I didn't or I cropped it that way to keep the sweetgums from being down too far in the frame. Great idea about toning down that leaf...I misjudged how bright it was!

[John Chardine]

Lovely composition Jules. Agree that a bit more room given to the top leaf would be useful. I really like how the yellow in the BG more or less frames the fruits. Seeing angles and compositions like this in natural subjects that you manipulate is one of the most difficult things in photography for me.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Jules,
We have them here in Jersey too.....not in my yard but I have a zillion acorns from the oaks! Agree with the tweak suggestions above.....nice to see you popping back in here.....still can't believe the spider......;):2eyes2:

[Anita Bower]

Beautifully seen and captured. Those seedpod look like two jewels hanging amidst the gold of the BG. Clipped leaf doesn't bother me, but toning down suggestion is good idea. I like how taking a picture of a little bit of a tree captures the feeling of the whole.

[Norm Dulak]

Jules, you have a very good one here. If you do nothing further with it, that's fine.:D

But if the image were mine, and the data in my file permitted it, I would perform the following tweaks.

I would add more canvas at the top, encompassing all of the almost complete uppermost leaf. I would also clone out the fragment of the leaf and stem that merge above the uppermost leaf. Finally, I would crop away a bit of the negative space at the bottom of the image.

Norm:cheers:

[Bob Miller]

Like your angle ...agree with above crop suggestions and toniong down that bright leaf.