Assignment 6: Landscape and Nature

Elliott Slaughter: Veins

I love how you can see you can see veins on leaves when they are backlit by the evening sun. Sometimes I like to imagine that the little rectangles are cells, even though I'm pretty sure the actual cells must be too small to see with the naked eye. The detail on this photo looks a lot more impressive when you view the full size image.

I took this on on Governor's Lane in the evening with my medium 35-70mm zoom lens which also doubles as a macro lens. Under direct sunlight, I had more than enough illumination to hand-hold this shot, which was good because there was a little breeze causing the leaves to more around. I tried to make the lens as close to parallel to the leaf as possible, although as you can see on the right side of the image I didn't quite manage that.

Since I used the macro setting on my lens to take this, the depth of field was shallow enough to blur out the background nicely, even at f/13. In Photoshop, I increased contrast to bring out the grid pattern on the leaf, but otherwise left the white balance and other settings as shot by the camera.