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Thread: Portrait of a Leaf

  1. #1
    Julie Kenward
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    Default Portrait of a Leaf

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    I tend to get a little crazy about leaves this time of year. I find myself making leaf portrait after leaf portrait - sometimes a singular one, sometimes a whole group of them together.

    Some attract my eye because of their deeply saturated colors while others grab my attention with their drab, colorless brown tones. Some make me click my shutter because of their surroundings or their backgrounds while others get under my skin with the patterns of their veins or their torn corners.

    No matter what it is that attracts me, though, it is always the lighting that makes me fall in love with a particular image. It's hard this time of year not to start to think of the leaf as the subject of my images but, as we all know, it is the way the leaf is lit that is so crucially important. Beautiful lighting - the kind of lighting you get in autumn and winter - can really set apart the images you create at this time of year. Even in the early afternoon, the light is more filtered, more diffused as the intense colors of spring and summer fade back, letting the golden glow of natural lighting come filtering through.

    So far this season, this is one of my favorite images. I like the simplicity, the angles, and, most of all, that ethereal lighting that happens on the edge of the woods right before the sun goes down.

    Canon 40D, EF 70-200mm f/4L
    f4 @ 1/640th, ISO 250
    Manual mode, Pattern metering
    Handheld, natural lighting, late afternoon sun
    Minimal processing in ACR & CS4.

  2. #2
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    Julie, This has to be one of my favorites as well, soft and sweet light, nice comp.. I like it alot

  3. #3
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    This really says "autumn's ending, winter's not far off" to me. I like your comp, and of course the light and BG. In this case the tattered leaf works much better than a pristine one would, I think.

    I think it would be just a tad better if the bright area at UL contained more of the surrounding hue, and weren't so close to white (light gray). A color fill layer sampled from nearby BG, masked to just the bright areas, and set to Color blending mode with reduced opacity would do it. Here's an example.
    Last edited by Chris Starbuck; 11-02-2008 at 05:15 PM. Reason: correct image color space

  4. #4
    Julie Kenward
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    Looks beautiful Chris...I'll give it a try.

  5. #5
    Gus Cobos
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    Simple and elegant Julie, I like it...:cool:

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