Lentzer walked slowly through the park. He had been this way before, many times. It was the place he went when his headed needed space to breathe, when the confusion that circled inside of him now would often begin to untangle itself. Not today. The tangled knots remained and his head remained a claustrophobic space; a small closed room on hot summer day. His thoughts could not get space to breathe. He kicked through the carpet of fallen leaves on the grass and moved on maybe he needed to sit by the stream.
The vibrant colours of the fallen autumn leaves presented a compelling study in colour. The leaves had fallen out of a single maple tree and they were scattered around. I knew that I wanted a photograph that had a field of view that was completely dominated by this red orange colour so I had to move myself around to get a perspective that had nothing in the background. Sometimes we photographers get lazy when we say things like “there was nothing I could do about it, that power pole was in the frame.” We decide what is in the frame, we decide where we are standing, what is in focus, what lens to use, and where we point the camera. If we aren’t happy with what is in the frame then we need to move, crop, change lens, or change aperture. The photograph that we take is all of ours and everything in it is there because we have chosen to let it remain there.
-Russell Berg