To me, nothing screams autumn like red leaves. I’ve been looking for red leaves for the last several weeks, but they have been hard to come by. I’ve seen a lot of yellow and some orange, but very little red. The few times I have found trees with red leaves, the leaves were pretty sparse and had mostly fallen to the ground.
But, on a recent quick morning trip to Gator Pond in the Dagmar Wildlife Management Area, I finally found the nice red leaves I had been looking for, and they were still attached to their trees. And, their reflection in the water below was amazing.
Because the trees were on the far bank, I pulled out my 100-400mm lens and zoomed all the way to the longest focal length, 400mm. This framed the scene perfectly and included not only the trees but also their reflections.
Since the trees were so far from my position, depth of field was not a concern. I could have used any aperture, and the trees would have still been sharp. Since most lenses are at their sharpest at one to two f-stops down from open, I selected an aperture of f/8.
This put my shutter speed at 0.6 seconds, which makes me nervous when I’m photographing flowers or foliage. Even the slightest breeze can cause the leaves to rustle and move and be blurred in the photograph. The longer the shutter speed, the greater the chance of having blurred leaves. But, I got lucky, and there was absolutely no hint of any air movement.
Processing the image, my main goal was to separate the leaves from the rest of the background. To do this, I added a significant amount of contrast and then darkened the shadows even further. This pulled the red leaves forward and pushed everything else more into the background.
I then turned my attention to how to best provide some color saturation without oversaturating them. There are times when I like the effect of oversaturated colors but not often. Just as you lose detail in areas of a photograph that are overexposed, you lose detail in areas in which the colors are oversaturated. In most instances, you do not want to lose the detail in your photograph. Also, from a personal standpoint, I usually find oversaturated colors to be a bit garish and too much “in your face.”
I have found over the years that red colors are one of the easiest colors to oversaturate, so when dealing with something that is red, I try to be very careful. To address the oversaturation issue with the leaves, I used the targeted adjustment tool in Lightroom’s HSL tab. I first increased the saturation of the red leaves, and then I reduced their luminance.
Using this process, I was able to prevent unwanted oversaturation and end up with this photograph.