A few weeks ago, I decided to make an early morning trip to the eastern part of the Ouachita National Forest. My goal was to find and photograph any last vestiges of Autumn color. I wasn’t sure if there would be many leaves on the trees after the couple of windy days we’d had, but I thought I’d give it a shot anyway.
Arriving right at sunrise, I turned onto one of the forest roads that wind through the forest. As I had suspected would happen but had hoped it wouldn’t, most of the trees had already dropped their leaves. It seemed my goal of finding that last bit of autumn color was unlikely to be accomplished.
Continuing to drive along slowly, I began to notice a few small trees here and there that were still defiantly hanging on to some of their red leaves. I stopped several times in different locations to get some pictures, but either there weren’t that many leaves on the tree or there was a distracting tangle of other brush and tree limbs around it. Either way, it wasn’t what I was looking for.
Just as I was about to call it a day, I came upon this tree. It still had a good amount of leaves on it, and the background wasn’t a jumbled-up distracting mess. It was the best I had seen all morning.
I stopped my truck in the middle of the forest road (there was, of course, no shoulder to pull on to), grabbed my camera and tripod, and found a location from which to capture the image.
I still had my 24-70mm lens attached to the camera from a previous stop. Looking at the screen on my camera, I quickly realized I needed a longer focal length to get the exact framing I wanted. Walking back to my truck, I grabbed my 100-400mm lens. After switching lenses, I zoomed to 153mm and got the perspective I was looking for.
Processing the file in Lightroom, I decreased the overall exposure by about 2/3 of a stop, which helped emphasize the red leaves. To enhance the contrast, I increased the highlight areas and darkened the shadows. I added some clarity and boosted the color vibrance and saturation. Finally, I cropped the image to a 4×5 aspect ratio.
Finally, in Photoshop, I desaturated a few errant red leaves that just seemed to be randomly scattered throughout the image, applied sharpening, and then adjusted the contrast further by using the Levels dialog box to adjust the highlights, shadows, and midtones.