When I’m out photographing, I have a tendency to walk along and generally look at only what is in front of me or to the left and right. I don’t often think to look up, look down, or look behind me. I suspect a lot of people do this same thing regardless of their photographic genre. So, on a recent trip to Holland Bottoms Wildlife Management Area, I tried something a little bit different. I would walk twenty or thirty feet, stop, and look around in all directions to see if anything caught my eye. If not, I moved on.
As I was making my way out of Holland Bottoms to go home, I was keeping my eyes open for additional photographic subjects. While I wasn’t as diligent in my twenty to thirty foot process as I was when I first arrived, I was still making sure to look in all directions. Because of that, I found this lichen covered tree branch surrounded by fallen leaves, and I loved the color contrast created by the green lichen and the brown leaves.
I set my camera and tripod up directly over the branch. Using my 24-70mm lens, zoomed out until I felt the amount of leaves in the frame provided balance to the lichen covered branch. This gave me a focal length of 45mm.
Because the distance between the subject and the camera sensor was no more than 18 inches, I knew the depth of field was going to be very shallow, only a few inches. Because the entire frame needed to be sharp, I needed to maximize depth of field, so I made sure to position the back of the camera parallel to the scene I was photographing.
With the camera properly positioned, the next thing I needed to consider regarding the depth of field was aperture. After careful thought, I selected f/16 figuring that would provide sufficient depth of field to keep the entire frame sharp. As it turned out, that was a good choice.
Processing the image, I wanted to emphasize the color contrast that had caught my attention, so I spent time working with the luminance and saturation sliders to enhance the contrasting colors. I also increased the contrast of the overall image to provide a little more separation between the branch and the leaves to come to this final image.