FEEDBACK - Knaresborough, Yorkshire

It was stereotypically torrid weather yesterday. Drizzle, grey leaden skies and misty foggy damp sunless day! That said, upon walking down by the river in Knaresborough and observing the wonderful subtle blue green dew ladened field in the distance, decided to use it as a backdrop for these turning beach leaves.

I use a shallow depth of field to push the background out of focus and simplify the foreground leaves, the light was also turning fast into twilight (about 4pm), so I used a high ish ISO and long ish shutter speed... Blah, blah, blah...

The composition was tricky, (as trees tend to be), but I used a long lens to pick out a reasonably balanced branch and evenly spread leaves (in both colour and weight) and attempted to keep a decent flow of space around some key elements. For me the thin delicate branches needed to cut through the soft subtle colours of the field in the distance but I wanted to avoid any heavy strong branches that would spoil the delicate nature of the shot. It was a challenge keeping the leaves sharp so I underexposed at 200 iso but it still came out at one second!

I’m very happy at the results here, especially the colour. Some of you may not believe me when I say I didn’t add any saturation at all to this, but if you look at the leaves in isolation you will see the colours are genuine!