I Want Snow!

[Bigbitt8706]

Were i'm from, we have 3 seasons: fall, spring, and holy crap you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. Luckily it's still fall, but i would love to see some snow, or something resembling winter weather! anyway, enough of my rambling, here is a dead tree i found, CnC is very apreciated:

http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii262/bigbitt8706/_MG_5415edited1.jpg

[Bill Boehme]

And then when it does get cold ... you will be complaining about the idiots who don't know how to drive on ice and snow. :)

Very beautiful leaf color. as we well know that in Texas the fall colors consists of mainly just one -- brown (although I did get excited when I spotted a few yellowish-brown ones).

Just a few critique comments:

Don't worry -- the tree isn't really dead.
Nice composition and smooth bokeh.
I think a little more DOF would have been better.

[Cdeming]

Well, if you want snow, we should trade places. We're under a winter storm warning up here in Chicago and it's snowing out the wazoo.

Anywho...Nice job capturing the detail in the veins of the leaf! I agree with Bill, it would be nice to have a tad more DOF, but I still think it's a great shot.

[Robert_Lay]

Why is the upper portion and the right hand portion out of focus?

[SwingBopper]

Lovely colors there; but I agree you need more DOF and I'd like to see the whole leaf. I imagine the OOF is due to the leaf being bent away from the focus point, so you might try pressing it to straighten it if you do another one like this.

[swimmergrl]

Nice picture, though I agree a little more dof would be nice. If you want winter, you could come to Kansas where you get egg frying summers and freeze your @$$ off winters, and tornadoes in between!

In the last year I've been hit by the famous finals week ice storm of December 2007 and a tornado that hit my university campus! (And I live about 5 blocks from campus!)

Rachel

[mdjgcl]

More DOF for sure. I'd like to see a crop of the one leaf panel that is in focus. All the broken veining in a bright red background would really pop. Just a thought. As far as snow and cold....left Ottawa and will hang out in Florida all winter. Retirement is great!:)

[Bigbitt8706]

bill- I'm one of those idiots that don't know how to drive on the snow! I still want some though :) .... I tried on this one to have the narrowest DOF possible, as I had my flash right behind the leaf and I wanted a bright background... A bigger f number made the sky and everything behind the leaf way too dark for me


Cdeming- well send some extra snow down here! Right now it's 70 and humid, so pretty much typical December weather for me :( .... Thanks for the compliment on the shot, but more DOF made the background to dark for me... I wish there was a way to fix it

Robert- I think the leaf was slightly bent, so some stuff went OOF with such a huge aperture


Swingbopper- I would love more DOF on this shot, but I can't figure out how to do that without making the background so dark, or blowing some highlights...Pressing the leaf is a great idea, I really need to try that

Swimmergrl- and I thought we had erratic weather in Texas! Tornadoes do suck, a few years back an f5 got about 2 miles away from my house, and we could hear the thing go through buildings... It sounded like a pissed off freight train

Mdjgcl- I wish I could get more DOF, but I used my flash and I don't want to make the background amy darker... Any sugestions as to how in the world to fix that would be greatly appreciated... Why are you leaving the snow? Aaaahhh I want to throw a snowball at someone so bad!!! :)

[Bill Boehme]

I tried on this one to have the narrowest DOF possible, as I had my flash right behind the leaf and I wanted a bright background... A bigger f number made the sky and everything behind the leaf way too dark for me

I think that the answer might be to use manual exposure and manual flash.

First to get greater depth of field, but keep the background lighting the same, decrease the aperture size (larger aperture number) by three stops and then slow the shutter speed by three stops. By doing this, we have kept the background light level the same, but increased DOF.

Next, I would not trust auto flash to give the correct illumination, so set the flash to manual and the flash level to about 1/8 of full power and take a test shot. This will take some trial and error, but adjust the flash level up or down until the results look right.