We go back to 1999, or maybe even slightly farther, for this one, an old staple of my abstract images. This is mostly because all of the slides I just scanned for potential use this week didn’t really pass muster, and I’m too tired to scare up some other choices.
Falls Lake, as I mentioned earlier, used to be a regular haunt of mine, and one fall I was out in the morning when the air was preternaturally still. A single American sweetgum leaf (Liquidambar styraciflua) offered a splash of colors against the extremely muted reflection of the sky, and so I framed the way it felt right and fired off a shot.
Actually, if memory serves I found the leaf floating closer to shore, and tossed it further out to use the gradient tones of the water reflections better, rather than shooting more downwards where the light would penetrate to the clay bottom. Yeah, that’s us unethical nature photographers: always tampering.