One of my favorite times to take photos is after a rain, especially if the weather is mild and not freezing, excessively windy, or other such adverse condition. Another ideal opportunity is in the morning when the sun is just peeking over the horizon. But when you combine the two, you can really see something special–as long as you’ve got your eyes open and are looking for it, that is. When I left for work on one such morning I made sure to bring my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along with me, and on the short walk between my car and my office on the Oklahoma State University campus I made sure to keep my eyes peeled in an effort to actively seek out something to photograph: a subject, a scene, a mood, or anything else that might look good when captured with my camera.
I soon came across this small cluster of yellow leaves on a tree near the Library building, and two things immediately stood out to me: the shiny reflection cast by the sunlight behind me hitting the wet leaf in the middle, and the the bright spot of light in the background produced by a yellow lamp at the edge of a sidewalk. (Another nice thing about shooting photos in the early morning: lights such as that one haven’t yet been switched off for the day, which means it’s possible to get some really fun lighting conditions that simply are not present for the rest of the day.) Instead of shooting into the low sun, which I have done a few times recently on rainy mornings, I decided to put the sun to my back and use it to highlight the wet portion of the leaf while capturing the dim light shining from the lamp post across the way. It was a best-of-both-worlds situation and I think I did a pretty good job of capturing the scene in the way I hoped to.
I shot this at 105mm, of course, with a fairly wide aperture of f/4.8 partly to turn the lamp into a large blurry spot of yellow but also to get a relatively low ISO of 1600. Much smaller on the aperture front and this would have quickly gone up to 3200 or 6400 ISO which, while not unacceptable and certainly something I could deal with in Lightroom, would still have been less than ideal. I really wanted the richness of the colors and texture to show through in the final shot, and f/4.8 gave me just what I was looking for.
The other compositional element that proved to be a tad tricky was positioning myself such that the three main elements (green leaves, yellow leaves, and lamp light) were arranged just so. There wasn’t a lot I could do for the leaves, but I did put myself in a specific spot such that the blur of light was cradled neatly between two sharp points of yellow. I had to take a dozen shots to get one that looked just like this, but in the end I’m really happy with how it turned out and glad I was able to spend a minute or two taking this shot before the sun got higher, the lamps were turned off, and the magic of the scene gave way to what was, by probably anyone’s account including my own, just another normal day. But even normal days can be special too :)
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