This picture is somewhat of a return to form, you might say, albeit not exactly intentionally. It’s not like I threw away my full-frame camera and macro lens, in order to recapture my roots with my original 50mm lens and Nikon D200 body, but the idea here isn’t too far (literally as well as geographically) from some of the pictures I took years and years ago. Like many of my earlier images I shot this right in my own back yard, and there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy that went into the planning of this photo. It wasn’t planned at all, really. But the end result is an image that I like quite a bit, and more than that, really enjoyed taking.
One recent evening after a few hours of rain had quenched the parched ground, I found myself with a bit of time while my kids were playing video games and my wife was out with a friend. I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired or even fully lucid, having not slept all that well the previous night, but I thought I would grab my camera and walk around the yard just to see what I might capture despite my somewhat wan frame of mind. I’m sure glad I did, as often this kind of simple act can, in and of itself, provide just the kind of revival, to to speak, that might be needed.
I had my eye out for color, or at least contrast, that stood out in the overcast evening. Much of our yard was varying shades of earth tones–green, brown, and a little red in the dirt which is not unusual for our modest residential property here in Oklahoma–so when I saw this leaf, and several others like it, I thought it might make an interesting picture. It’s not that this single individual leaf stood out from the rest in any particular way; it just kind of looked good, if you know what I mean. I saw it and though I bet that would make for a good photograph. So that’s what I tried to do.
I squatted down on the somewhat soggy grass, put my camera in Live View, flipped up the screen just a bit, dialed in an aperture of f/11 with minimum shutter speed of 1/180 second, and fired off a couple of shots. (My aging D750, as I have written about before, still stands toe-to-toe with any modern camera in terms of straight-up image quality, but when it comes to composing in Live View…well, let’s just say it’s pretty outdated. It works great if the subject is still though, which this leaf most certainly was.) This one ended up as my favorite from the bunch: the leaf is sharp, detailed, and stands out from the foreground and background. It even has a cool purple fringe on the lower portion which is not, as one might assume, an optical artifact from light bouncing around in the lens, but just the natural color of the leaf as it withers away.
There’s one other feature of this photo that I wanted to share, or rather, a bit of information (disclosure, perhaps?) about how it was processed. As with most of my Nikon D750 photos I shot this in RAW, and here you can see a closeup the original image:
It’s darker, of course, and the colors are not as pronounced, but that’s to be expected on an undeveloped RAW file. It’s also quite noisy, since it was shot at ISO 2200. But here’s the same section of the final image:
This is entirely due to the AI Noise Removal tool in Lightroom, which I have found myself using more and more thanks to the incredible quality of its results. I don’t know exactly how it works, all I know is that it sure does work. It’s so much nicer than fiddling with the Color and Luminance sliders that I used for years, and does an outstanding job of preserving details that would otherwise be lost with the old way of removing noise.
Anyway, just thought I’d share :)
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