Morning Maple

I love when the morning or afternoon sunlight strikes and illuminates the colors of fall foliage. In this photo of maple tree leaves from the inspiring Boston Arnold Arboretum I isolated a branch with four maple leaves in peak autumn colors. The leaves were sun-kissed while the background made out of shrubs and other tree foliage remained mostly in the shade. I used a Polarizing Filter to further darken the shadow parts, adding more drama and enhancing the natural green, yellow and orange colors. The polarizer also eliminated any unwanted and distracting glare on the foliage. A 70-200mm lens, fully zoomed in, produced the limited Depth of Field and background bokeh that I had envisioned, laying the attention solely on the beautiful fall colored foliage. At first, the wind was kind of a problem but increasing the ISO from 100 to 200, lots of patience and multiple exposures guaranteed a useable photographic capture of this beautiful autumn scenery. The higher ISO setting allowed me to set a camera aperture of f/8 and provided a shutter speed of 1/200 second. I chose to underexpose by 1 full stop to saturate and intensify colors. During post processing I removed dust spots, minimally adjusted contrast, lighting and color saturation before sharpening the final Fall Foliage photography image.

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