One of the really nice things about a trip to Holland Bottoms Wildlife Management Area is that it is only about a twenty minute drive from my house. So, it’s the perfect location for when I get the urge to go out and photograph but I don’t feel like going very far.
I recently made a visit to Holland Bottoms, and, in keeping with my photographic rules, I decided I would just walk around the area and see what I could find. If I never pulled out my camera, that was just fine. I was just going to enjoy being outdoors.
Normally, I tend to spend most of my time walking around stopping only to take a picture. I’m not really studying my surroundings. On this trip, I decided to take a more deliberate approach. I would walk twenty or thirty feet, stop, and look around to see if anything caught my eye. If not, I moved on. I had repeated this process for about half an hour when I noticed a large fallen tree. Walking over to check it out, I discovered these leaves and acorn shells that were lying atop the moss that was lying on top of the fallen tree.
There were several different areas on the tree that contained leaves and acorn shells, so I spent a few minutes handholding my camera and looking through the viewfinder to find what I thought was the best section to photograph. Once I found the area I liked best, I set up my camera and tripod.
It was very important that the entire frame was sharp, so I carefully positioned the camera so the back of the camera was as parallel to the tree as possible to maximize depth of field. But, the positioning of the camera alone was not enough to ensure complete sharpness. Each of the subjects (the leaves, the acorn shells, and the lichen) were at slightly different distances relative to the camera sensor. I had to select an aperture that would account for this difference, and f/13 achieved that.
With my ISO set at 100 to minimize digital noise, a four second shutter speed was necessary to achieve proper exposure. This wasn’t an issue because there was no wind to blow the leaves around and blur them in the picture.
Processing the image, I increased the overall contrast of the image and then spent time working with the saturation and luminance of the reds, oranges, yellows, and greens to get to this final photograph.