Story Behind the Image | Fall Leaves

Hey everyone. So this is the first post of our story behind the images. We want to share with you our adventure of shooting and creating. We'll go through our thought process and inspiration behind some of our favorite images. We'll also share with you the technical details we used and what we had to go through to capture them. Thanks for reading, enjoy!

Even though fall is past, this image captures how I feel about the weather right now. I took this image in November of 2009. I went out in search for fall leaves. I wanted something with rich color to express the current season. I drove out to Julian with this goal in mind and plenty of time to do some shooting. I hiked around in search for trees that were changing colors. I shot a few things but didn't find anything that I was really that excited about. So I packed up my stuff and started to head back to San Diego. I was feeling a little down on my drive back for not accomplishing what I had set out to do.

The sun had set and the light was quickly fading as I drove through part of town. Just off the side of the road I saw this tree with large full branches of beautifully colored leaves. I pulled the car over and got my camera out, excited about my discovery. It was cold and the wind was picking up, rustling the branches about.

I increased my ISO setting to 500 and changed my aperture to 3.5. I did this so I could shoot a little faster to freeze the action of the moving branches. I was shooting close ups and didn't want them to translate into blurry blobs of color. The settings on my camera worked well, but still I had little light to work with, so I also used my tripod to keep things sturdy. This image was created at 1/30 of a sec, so the tripod was helpful. The aperture setting also gave me a low depth of field which creates a soft feeling in this image that I really like, and the leaves in focus show up beautifully crisp.

This tree came across my path just in time. I stayed there and took a few more shots as it got dark and then packed up my things. On my way home, I felt better knowing the last shots I did were going to come out great. Just when I stopped looking, I found what I went there for, weird how that happens.