I have photographed this tree in my backyard several times in the past. However, the pictures have always seemed boring and uninspiring to me. What caught my attention this morning was the small cluster of red leaves that broke up the large expanse of green. I quickly grabbed my camera and tripod and set up my equipment.
After taking a couple of shots, the wind began to pick up. At first, I became frustrated as the blowing wind caused the leaves to sway. Several minutes passed while I impatiently waited for the wind to subside. I began envisioning a different image in which the leaves would be blurred by the wind while I kept the tree trunk in focus. Keeping the trunk sharp was very important for this picture. The juxtaposition of the sharply focused trunk and the blurred leaves would indicate the leaf blurring was a creative decision.
To achieve the maximum amount of blur, and thus abstraction, in the blowing leaves, I needed as long of a shutter speed as I could get. To do this, I set the aperture to f/40, which was the smaller aperture available. I lowered my ISO from my usual 400 to 100. I then added another 2/3 of a stop using the exposure compensation dial to slightly overexpose the scene. This is not something I normally do out of concern for overexposing any highlights. However, the cloudy sky mitigated that concern. The combination of these adjustments gave me a shutter speed of two seconds, which allowed the leaves to show significant blurring without losing all detail.
In Adobe Camera Raw, I lowered the exposure by 3/4 of a stop, which effectively offset the slight overexposure, and increased the image’s overall contrast. I also added a great deal of saturation to the leaves to further separate them from the tree trunk. I then opened the image in Photoshop and applied the Tonal Contrast filter in Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4. This provided some additional contrast which really made the picture stand out.
Settings: 400mm, 2 sec, f/40, ISO 100