Autumn Leaves and Lightning

I mentioned last week how, even though the calendar says Autumn is officially here, I just haven’t gotten that Autumn feel yet.  Autumn means colorful leaves, fallen beds of leaves that crunch under your feet when you walk through the woods, and cooler temperatures that put a little nip in the air.

Well, since the Autumn equinox, daytime temperatures have generally been in the low to mid-80s, the mornings have been only slightly cooler, and the leaves continue to cling stubbornly to their trees.  Not exactly inspiring much of an Autumn feeling.  But, there is one sign that Autumn really is right around the corner and getting closer every day:  the changing leaf colors I’m starting to see in some very small, sporadic areas, including in my front yard, which is where I found these colorful leaves.

I had stepped out to the front porch to convince my wife that, since it was obviously lightening, it was time for her and our dog to come back inside.  Turning around to go inside myself, I spotted these leaves.  I ran inside, grabbed my camera, tripod, and 100-400mm lens and hurried back outside to grab a few quick shots.

I hurriedly set everything up, but I found my longest focal length wasn’t long enough to frame the scene the way I wanted.  So, with the lightning getting more frequent, I did the only thing I could do — I ran back inside and grabbed my 1.4x teleconverter to increase my focal length to 560mm, and that worked perfectly.  Realizing that what I was doing probably wasn’t the smartest thing to be doing, I took a shots and went inside.

The one thing that concerned me when I was photographing the leaves was that my shutter speed was 10 seconds.  While there wasn’t much of a discernable breeze, I was pretty confident that there would be enough of one during those 10 seconds to blur the leaves and ruin the picture.  When I opened the files on my computer, I discovered I was correct.  All the images showed leaf movement, so I decided I would try again in the morning.

When I woke up the next morning, I wasn’t sure what I would find.  Would the leaves still be there?  Would the previous night’s storms have knocked them off the tree?  I didn’t know, but the only thing I could do was step outside and look.  When I did, I discovered that the leaves were still there, the wind was calm, and the lingering cloud cover provided the perfect lighting.

Processing the image, I spent time enhancing the contrast between the green, yellow, red, and orange leaves.  I also darkened the background shadow areas to further separate the tree and leaves from the background.  Finally, I experimented with cropping the image into several different formats before deciding a square 1×1 crop worked best.