Although it’s probably right on its typical schedule, Autumn’s arrival this year has seemed excruciatingly slow to arrive. Watching and waiting for the leaves to burst into their vibrant colors day after day, week after week, all I’ve been able to find so far have been a few patches here and there. And, conveniently, one of those patches of color was in my own front yard.
Stormy weather was predicted to be making its way in overnight, so I was standing on my front porch that evening watching the clouds moving across the sky. The various shapes, textures, and colors were amazing. Naturally, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add some more skies to my library for future use, so I ran inside, grabbed my camera, and began photographing them.
After several minutes, the qualities that originally caught my attention began to wane, and I decided it was time to call it good. As I started to go back inside, I happened to catch something out of the corner of my eye. Turning my head, I saw, in my front yard, this tree covered in bright yellow leaves.
The light level was already pretty low, and it was getting darker by the second — the kind of conditions where a tripod would be highly useful. But, again, I didn’t have it, and I didn’t have much time to go get it. So, I put the camera on Program mode, set the aperture to Auto, and pressed the shutter button.
Handholding a camera in late evening lighting with a relatively slow shutter speed made me somewhat uneasy about what the results were going to be. But, when I opened the file on my computer, I was amazed and thrilled to find that everything was sharp. Now, it was just a matter of getting the final image to look like what I envisioned when I captured the scene.
What had originally caught my attention was the contrast between the brighter yellow leaves of the tree and the darker green pine needles of the background pine trees. That’s what I wanted to reproduce in the final image, so I spent a fair amount of time working to increase the contrast between those elements.
The yellow leaves also looked somewhat washed out and dull, so I increased the luminance and saturation of the yellow and orange tones while reducing the same qualities in the greens. This served to further enhance the contrast and make the yellow leaves stand out almost as if the tree was standing in a spotlight.
Finally, as bright as the yellow leaves were, they still didn’t seem to take center stage against all the greens in the image. I resolved that issue by cropping the picture into a 1:1 square crop so that the yellow-leaved tree was the dominant element in the frame resulting in this final image.
For comparison, you can see the difference between the original image and the final photograph below.
