I recently took a week off from work and used that time to get in some photography. After all, what better time is there for photography other than Autumn? Oh, yeah, winter, spring, and summer.
While the changing of the leaves wasn’t as widespread as I would have hoped for, I was still able to come away with a few nice shots. But, I wanted more. So, the following weekend, I decided to make a trip to the Ouachita National Forest, which I had not visited in nearly two years and is a relatively short drive of about an hour from my house.
I arrived about half an hour before sunrise, so it was still quite dark. Sitting in my truck waiting for it to get a little bit brighter, I was able to just make out the forms of some trees, branches, and leaves. From what I could see through the darkness, the scene had the potential to be an interesting photograph. I waited for what seemed like hours for the sky to get bright enough for me to get out and really assess the situation.
Finally, it got just light enough that I could see more of the scene’s details. There were a lot of different colors: yellows, oranges, greens, purples, and even a few leaves of red. The trees on the left and right, as well as the overhanging branches, conveyed the sense of a pathway leading to a mysterious interior sanctuary where a small tree was standing in quiet solitude. Even the fence added to that sense of mystery as if you needed to know the password, or perhaps the answer to a riddle, in order to enter that quiet sanctum.
Reminding myself to “follow the process,” I spent several minutes walking around with my camera in my hand trying to find the best framing. I would take a few steps, look through the viewfinder, and assess the composition. I continued this process until I found the precise arrangement of elements that created the image I was looking for. Not until I was satisfied with the composition did I set up the tripod.
My next step in the process was to determine exposure settings. With my ISO set to 100, as it usually is to minimize noise, I selected an aperture of f/10, which is in the middle of the lens’s aperture range. This gave me acceptable sharpness throughout the frame, but it resulted in a shutter speed of eight seconds. Normally, I try to avoid using shutter speeds this long because of the strong likelihood that air movement will cause the leaves to be blurred. In this case, though, the air was completely calm; there was absolutely no wind or breeze whatsoever. In fact, when I reviewed the image on my computer at 100%, I could not find any blurred leaves anywhere. If there are some, they are inconsequential.
To process the image, I increased the saturation of the red, green, and blue color channels using the Calibration sliders. When I captured the image, I had intentionally increased the exposure by ⅓ of an f-stop in order to capture as much information as possible and eliminate as much digital noise as possible without overexposing the highlights. In Lightroom, I reduced this overexposure and increased overall contrast. Using the Luminance and Saturation sliders, I enhanced the green, yellow, orange, and red colors. I then made adjustments using the Tone Curve to tweak the contrast and then added a slight vignette. Finally, I opened the file in Photoshop and applied sharpening to achieve the final result.