My route home from my trip to the Ouachita National Forest took by Lake Maumelle. The lake was created in 1958 when the construction of a dam across the Big Maumelle River was completed, and water began flowing into the reservoir. The lake, which covers approximately 8,900 acres, is a primary source of drinking water for Little Rock and several surrounding cities and is a popular location for boating and fishing. It’s also a good place to find photographic subjects.
I stopped at an area known as Sleepy Hollow Access, walked down to the boat launch area, and gave it a look, but I didn’t really see much that interested me. As I walked back to my truck, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. Turning my head, I spotted a blaze of red leaves among a stand of trees. I had all but given up on finding a nice group of red leaves to photograph, but there they were. There was no way I was going to pass up this opportunity. I hurried to get my camera gear and then rushed back to the scene.
I spent some time with my camera in my hand looking through the viewfinder to find a pleasing composition. I spent some time trying to frame the scene in such a way that there was separation between all the different tree trunks. But, I quickly realized that wasn’t going to be entirely possible, so I pivoted to finding a position that would emphasize the contrast between the red leaves in the foreground and the green and yellow leaves in the background. When I finally found this particular framing that accomplished that goal, I set up the tripod.
In choosing my aperture, I wanted to make sure I had enough depth of field that both the group of three trees in the left foreground and the red leaves were sharp. Anything behind the red leaves could be less sharp. In fact, I wanted the background to be softer to help provide a little more separation and depth in the image. Using the Live View function on my camera, which I now use almost exclusively, I found that an aperture of f/11 accomplished what I wanted.
There was a bit of cloud cover in the sky, so the light level was soft and diffused. This meant that at the aperture I was using, the shutter speed would be 1/6 of a second. If there was any air movement, the leaves would rustle and be blurred in the photograph. But, after more than two hours of photography, the air remained absolutely still.
After I had established the composition and determined the exposure settings, I pressed the shutter button and captured these amazing red leaves.
In processing, I cropped the image slightly to eliminate a small portion of tree trunk located along the right edge of the frame that I found distracting and to eliminate some additional red leaves at the top. Red is an extremely strong color, and it doesn’t take much to overwhelm a photograph. When there is red in a picture, it is usually best to remember the old Brylcreem slogan “a little dab will do you.”
I lowered the color temperature to reduce the warm, orange tones, increased the overall contrast, adjusted luminance and saturation so the greens and yellow tended to recede and the red would be front and center, and made some final tweaks to the contrast. Finally, I sharpened the image using Topaz Sharpen AI to get to this final result.