Sometimes red is just red and sometimes it is blood and passion and loyalty. Sometimes red is the heat of anger, the all encompassing compulsion of love, the binding rage of jealousy. But sometimes red… is just red.

One fall I was walking around taking photos of the beautiful foliage and on impulse I picked up one leaf that I thought was particularly beautiful and I carried it around all over town taking pictures of it in different circumstances. (See another example of a portrait of this leaf here.) The leaf had such a wonderful colour and vein structure that I wanted an image that would really emphasize these two characteristics so I looked for a place where I could place it so that it would appear alone against the backdrop of the high sky. I twisted the stem around a small branch that was hanging down above me, composed so that you couldn’t see any other branches and took the picture underexposing a little. I pumped up the saturation levels a little and increased the contrast to give the red some real punch.

-Russell Berg