Hiking Red Hill
As my time in the North-East progressed as did the changing of the leaves. In my last weeks there the whole world seemed to be on fire in reds, yellows, and oranges. I took a beautiful hike up to a remote fire tower to see the expansive views of the leaves as they began to reach their peak of colorfulness. On the way back down the hill I was inspired to capture the falling of a leaf as the trees were beginning to shed their foliage.
As I walked back from the peak I kept me eyes on the path looking for the perfect leaf for my image. Upon finding my piece of nature I realized there was a problem with the image I wanted. I knew it would be nearly impossible to perfectly capture a leaf as it fell through the air, especially as I wanted to use a shallow depth of field that would make it unlikely that I could keep such a small object sharp in focus.
I decided to cheat and use photoshop, held a leaf in front of the camera, setting the focus manually and took an image, then I quickly removed the leaf and took another photo without moving the camera. This left me with a clean background to paint over my hand in Photoshop making it seem as if the leaf was just floating in mid air, perfectly framed and in focus.
