Oak Leaves Underwater

The idea for the image, “Oak Leaves Underwater” began some weeks ago when a friend at Photoworkshop offered a suggestion for how to loosen up my creativity for making digitally altered images. The idea was to shoot a series of photos with the intention that each shot would only be a partial composition, and that the whole would be joined together in post-processing. A simple enough idea. Why hadn’t I thought of it myself?





Most of my work, whether straight from the camera or digitally altered, is primarily about color composition. I do, of course, try to follow all of the principles of good composition and design, but I always think first about color. So on the Friday after Thanksgiving I got up early and went to the Lawrence Street Church in Lowell, with the idea of capturing images of some brightly colored stained glass to use as color layers in Photoshop.





One of the secrets of stained glass photography that I have learned is to go early in the morning. Turn out the house lights in the building and shoot the windows using only backlight from the spectrally rich early morning rays. With my Canon 30D and favorite 100mm Macro EFS lens, I fnd it best to underexpose by about 1 f-stop to deepen the color. This day I wasn’t interested in entire windows, but only in macro shots of individual glass panes, with their marbled textures and their swirling, blended reds, greens, ambers and violets.





Eight or ten good images would be enough. The rest of the morning for errands.





Shortly after lunch, my wife Cindy and I took a field trip to the Harold Parker State Forest in Andover, MA. We walk almost the same path every time we go there, but with the changing seasons, there is always something new and unexpected.





Our habit when we go hiking is to bring field guides with us, and identify species along the way. The Harold Parker is a mixed conifer-hardwood forest. Maple leaves had fallen a week or two earlier. Today would be the day for oak leaves. The ground was covered with them, freshly fallen and quite a few still on the trees. White Oak, Red Oak, Pin Oak, Bear Oak. The documentary layer for Oak Leaves Underwater was one of several shots that I snapped while leaning precariously over the edge of a quiet pond. The bottom, as you can see, was already thick with fallen Red Maple leaves from a week or more ago, with White and Red Oak nearer the top or floating on the surface. And a few needles of Eastern White Pine here and there to make it interestering.





I spent quite a few hours the following day combining images of the forest floor with panes of stained glass fom the church, using the Layers facility in Photoshop. A pane of Kelly green glass mottled with blue on the right-hand side was almost my last choice, because its bright value didn’t seem to belong with the muted fall colors of the oak leaves in the pond. Imagine my pleasant surprise to see the lovely pale aquamarines that emerged when I selected the Soft Light blending mode. One of the important points of color composition is that the colors in a piece must not only harmonize well with each other, but the overall color scheme should be consistent with the mood and the theme of the image. Aquamarine goes well with a water theme, don’t you think?. Most of my Photoshop starts I routinely drag to the trash, but for this one I decided to click the Save button.