Monthly Photo Tip - November 2009

While looking for the last colors of fall in the Boston area I ended up in the beautiful Arnold Arboretum. After working some ivy and shrubs over a bolder I came across these orange and red leaf trees. The leaves were showing peak color and screaming for a photographers eye. The drizzling rain accumulated on the tips of the leaves and gravity pulled the leaves downwards forming nature abstracts and a feast for any photographer. It took a few attempts to isolate a single leaf with a raindrop since a couple of times I moved in too close and instead of snapping the photo I ended up with the raindrop on my lens. In the end I found my leaf, zoomed all in and opened the aperture all up to blur out the background. The next photograph shows the same kind of leaves but from a different perspective. Here I focused on one of multiple rain soaked leaves and played with the depth of field. The settings were the same: long focus length and wide aperture setting to produce a shallow depth of field.