
This is one of those images for which I really had trouble coming up with a title. I usually don’t dwell on the title for more than a few seconds since it doesn’t really matter that much to me, and in the end just went for function over form. It happens :)
Every now and then I take a picture that fills me with an odd sense of deja vu. I can’t help but shake the feeling that I’ve seen it somewhere before, and that definitely happened here. I couldn’t quite place it though, and then after a while it hit me: It was strikingly similar to this shot I took way back on May 10, 2013, with my Nikon D200 and the same 50mm lens I use to this day. (Though perhaps not as much as back then, when it was the only lens I owned.) I liked the original so much that I used it as the masthead for Weekly Fifty, which you can still see if you go rooting around on the Wayback Machine :)
On some unconscious level I think I must have been channeling my younger self when I came across the scene you see on this week’s photo. I was on the OSU campus the morning after a long night of rain, hoping to take some photos of glossy greenery under overcast skies…but that luck simply did not pan out. By the time I went out with my camera nearly all signs of precipitation had evaporated, and instead of grey clouds there was a bright yellow sun and more than a bit of wind. It was, as one might charitably describe the situation, not ideal. And yet even in these kinds of circumstances it behooves one to keep his or her eye open and see what can be captured with a camera anyway. And when I saw this large brown leaf hanging down amidst a sea of yellow and orange, I knew I had found something worth photographing.
I tried to take my time and consider a few things when composing this photo, and I think it worked out pretty well. Of course I considered the basics of exposure: aperture, shutter, and ISO (though the latter are largely handled by Auto-ISO, but still…) as well as depth of field, sharpness, lighting, etc. You know–the fundamentals. But beyond that I really tried to pay close attention not just to the leaf on the left but the two on the right. I wanted them in the frame but blurry, and positioned such that they did not intrude on the subject or any other elements of the photograph. I also wanted an aperture that gave me just enough blurriness, but not too much. Basically, I knew I wanted the background to be just as important as the subject, and I adjusted my camera and composed the shot accordingly. And I think it worked. I quite like how everything came together in this photo, and the multiple layers work to create a composition that’s more than what you might see initially. (i.e. just a leaf.) I also like that I didn’t crop this at all: what you see here is what I shot, nothing more and nothing less. Things don’t always work out that way, but when they do it sure does feel good :)
And now I’m wondering if a decade from now I’ll take a picture of a leaf and think to myself “This reminds me of something…”