Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Six Faces of Leaves

Here are six views of the autumn leaves in one area, within a few minutes.  As I've done before, I'll point out how much the changing sunlight can dramatically alter an image.  But first, I want to drop in one iPhone shot from a little earlier in the day.  Walking through the woods with Ziva, I found these mushrooms almost hidden in the leaves by the side of the path.


That's one type of photo where a phone can do a very creditable job.  On the other hand, the images that follow would have had no interest for me if I'd shot them with a phone or other small format camera.  What I used was a Canon DSLR with a 300 mm lens, which meant I could isolate elements I wanted to feature, and effectively create complementary backgrounds out of things that could have been distracting.  The camera also could handle the wide range of bright and dark tones so that I could play with them and make the designs work.




Note how one group of leaves was struck by a sunbeam and stood out in the next photo.


A moment later, the light path had shifted and that beam was blocked by something in the canopy.  With an adjustment of the composition, the changed lighting gave me another picture that I liked.


After concentrating on the sunlit scenes above, I did a shot of a grouping near my eye level.


Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2014/11/six-faces-of-leaves.html

10 comments:

  1. Such wonderous finds and beautiful photos, colors, scenes! Thank you!

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  2. If you had included your foot in the first photo ... then you'd have a foot fungus, right?

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  3. May you never experience vemodalen.

    vemödalen – n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

    The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.
    The author’s mission is to capture the aches, demons, vibes, joys and urges that roam the wilderness of the psychological interior. Each sorrow is bagged, tagged and tranquilized, then released gently back into the subconscious.
    For complete transcript and photo credits, see here. http://twistedsifter.com/videos/vemodalen-by-john-koenig/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Twistedsifter+%28TwistedSifter+%29

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    1. Ah, well...so there's now a word for that which is experienced by countless strugglers among us, we who would be artists...sigh...*smile*
      The answer is that there is satisfaction to be found in the attempt to find something new, or more likely to see something old in a new way. Even if a search would quickly prove that others have done it before, and probably done it better, as I've said before in other contexts: our only direct experience of the universe is that which goes on within our own minds. So, to experience the doing of something, you have to do it, in your own way, as best you can. Therefore, why would I feel sorrow when I am doing something for myself, no matter how many others have done "the same thing"? Of course, emotions do not follow logic, so vemödalen may have its uses in my life!

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  4. The blue colors in the first photo are amazing...and the blue appearance of the tree trunks in the other photos is so pretty...did you do anything to enhance/change the colors or is that the way it was? Did it look that way to the naked eye or did it look blue in the camera, primarily? Amazing finds and photos at any rate. Thanks for sharing!!

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    1. The blue fungus (or lichen) on the mushrooms really was that color. The tree trunks have that sort of steel blue color under the light of an overcast sky, and I emphasized the saturation of the color a little, but not much - just enough to fit my impression when I was standing there, which was one of strong contrast between the blue and the reds and oranges.

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  5. Hmm...seems you are doing a series...seven faces of Ziva, six faces of leaves... are you counting down to a special date/event or ... ?

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    1. The idea of a series did occur to me, yes, but things are not going in numerical order, as you'll see from my latest post, "eight minutes". The motif of faces seems to have slipped away, too. I'm working on a PhD: partially hierarchical disorder. My thesis topic is Entropic of N-Capricorn, for which even the synopsis requires pages of dense mathematical expressions. [This is a joke, folks, and probably not a good one, but it is what it is. I've been away from physics and math for a long time!]

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