Gary Hart's Eloquent Images

Forest Autumn, Yosemite

Posted by Gary Hart (California, United States) on 20 November 2009 in Plant & Nature and Portfolio.

Continuing the theme of my previous post, today's image is an example of the kind of stuff that makes me happy. Fall color is always beautiful, but merely putting your eye to your camera and photographing a beautiful scene is no guarantee of a successful image. The closer you can come to identifying a scene's essence, what about the scene that moves you (and not what you think will move others), the more your photography will resonate.

The obvious draw of fall color is (duh) the color. But beyond that, I particularly love the way leaves light up when they're backlit. So when I wander forests in the fall I look for backlit leaves that stand out, leaves I can isolate from the distraction of their surroundings. When I find something that works, my job has just begun. Next I look for a complementary background that (if I'm lucky) also adds context. And finally I need to make my depth of field decision--do I want lots of DOF, or will too much background detail distract from my subject?

I found this group of leaves as I wandered the Merced River near Fern Spring in Yosemite Valley. I positioned myself so they stood out against the forest background. The forest had lots going on, so I opted for a wide open aperture to reduce it to a barely recognizable blur of color, shape, and line.

Scenes like this underscore my desire to be in charge of as much of my camera's decision making process as possible: spot metering in manual mode, manual focus, raw capture--all these things remove the decision process from my camera and give it to me. In this case, before composing I metered on a bright leaf and set the exposure to what I thought would give me the best color (in manual mode I can point my camera's meter anywhere and not have to worry about my settings changing when I recompose). The wind was nearly calm, but to be safe I bumped my ISO to 200 (the quality difference between ISO 100 and 200 is nearly imperceptible) to further insure against microscopic motion blur. And since I shoot in raw mode, I never have to make my white balance decisions until I'm in the comfort of my own office. When all my settings were complete, I returned my camera to the tripod, focused carefully on the center vein of the most prominent (leftmost) leaf (at f4 there's no margin for focus error), and shot.

My book of images, "The Undiscovered Country," is now available at Barnes & Noble

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- Upcoming workshops: Death Valley Winter and Yosemite Horsetail Fall and Winter Scenes
- To learn about my workshops, visit my Photograph California page
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