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A Carpet of Fallen Leaves
5 January 2022
It's been a rainy year, which has curtailed our daily tour of the environs. Which is bad for our health, generally speaking, and does nothing to raise our mood. So we look for breaks in the Doppler to take a quick walk around Edgehill Mountain, if nothing else.
Carpet. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at f5.1, 1/125 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
We have grown found of one particular block over the years. Don't ask us what the name of the street is. We're horrible with names because names are arbitrary (go on, just try naming a pet). Any Bowser could be a Kona, any Star a Twinkle.
But we know the street, if not its name.
And walking along it yesterday we brought ourselves up short in front of this carpet of leaves.
We have been admonished, in the past, not to step on expensive carpets laid out on long hallways. So naturally, we stopped in front of this pattern woven by nature.
And took out the little camera we had stashed in the pocket of our bulky coat. And took a photo. A stop underexposed (we had forgotten to reset the camera after our last shoot).
But because we were shooting Raw, that was no big deal. It could even be considered a plus. We had preserved the color information in the leaves at the expense of the wet dark sidewalk (which would have fooled the meter into a brighter exposure).
We didn't recover a full stop in Camera Raw, though. We tried a few variations before we settled on about two-thirds of a stop. And then we worked the highlights and shadows a bit.
The toughest thing about this image was the crop. We wanted the sidewalk lines to be symmetrical and that meant leaving some of the leaves out.
We could barely stand to part with any of them.