Just Hanging Around

Calgary has been experiencing unusually warm wether, and fall is slow in coming. I was out walking by the reservoir a few days ago and noticed some early signs of fall. I caught sight of this branch turning yellow and the first thing that came to mind was the old song, three little birds!! I guess the sight of leaves sitting on a branch and waiting to fall, reminded me of birds sitting on a wire; they are there one moment and gone the next. Hence the title: Just Hanging Around.

Some of you have asked me to include some technical information, so I will do this every so often.

First of all, contrary to what many think, I do not shoot in greyscale even though I certainly can. By shooting in colour, I am able to maintain all the colour data and by first desaturating, I produce an image in greyscale. By then moving the colour luminance slider, I can alter the brightness of individual aspects of the image very selectively. I also almost always shoot in RAW format which allows me to capture all the raw data without any compression in the camera.

In this image, I deliberately worked at isolating the leaves as much as possible and I did this in three ways. First of all, I used selective focus to put the background out of focus; I then used the sliders as mentioned above to really highlight the leaves, and lastly I use some vignetting to hopefully cause the viewer to remain focused on the leaves. I also warm toned the image as this seemed to increase the visual impact.

[photo for week of 14 September 2009]

© David Butts, 2009