A leaf dies slowly on the tree, it’s decay an amazing mixture of colour and form. Fuji X10 at 7mm f/2 1/1000 ISO 400

I continued wandering through Beban Park and saw this leaf just barely clinging to the tree and dying in such a beautiful display. I loved the way that the colour and form, especially the negative space formed by the parts of the leaf that had already decayed to be especially interesting. The light was so bright, however, that it was hard to distinguish the background from the foreground when I took the photo and I knew that this picture had a lot of potential but that it was going to require some work in post. After importing the image into Aperture I increased the saturation slightly and started to play with ways to pull the leaf off of the background. I increased the definition and this helped to make the edges more distinct but it still needed more so I burned in the photo on the edges and the parts of the background that showed through the holes in the leaf to darken it. This got me part of the way there but the colours were still so bright on the edges so I applied a gamma vignette that desaturated and darkened the edges some more. I applied a little more burn in to the holes in the leaf and it was there. The treatment added a lot of depth to the image and allowed this wonderful leaf to stand out from the background.

-Russell Berg