Notes from the field :

This day started with a goal to photograph in a location where some long-eared owls were reported, quite a few of them. However, after an hour drive and searching for the owls for close to an additional hour, I only found 2 of them. Both were much too buried in the brush to make worthwhile photographs. Good for their camouflage, bad for photography. It was nice seeing wild owls regardless.

Determined to make something for my time, I wandered the woods looking at various details. These leaves were only a few of the many subjects I did find. I suppose that is one of the great things about nature photography. Subject matter is everywhere if you really look for it. Then, hopefully you can make some order out of what generally appears very chaotic.

At the end of this morning, I wasn't so disappointed in not being able to photograph owls anymore. The leaves became my owls.

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About the subject :

Ok, so I have a bit of an affection for leaves. I always saw these melting 'leaf pockets' at the end of winter, but never bothered to photograph them. I still don't know exactly why they do this. Could be stored heat energy in the leaf, something to do with chemistry, or just the fact that it is just plain cool.

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Technical details :

This image is a digital capture with the Nikon D2X camera, which I am still learning about. A 105 f2.8 AF macro lens was used, ISO 200 setting. No filters or other alterations in Photoshop. Normally with glare on water I put a polarizer on. But in this case, I thought the slight glare emphasized the melted snow puddle a bit.

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About the composition :

1] I knew I wanted to photograph leaf pockets in snow because I found them so interesting. The search then was to find some that had good shapes, and a composition that I liked. I settled on this grouping of three because I liked its dynamic nature. They also revealed some leaf detail underneath the melting snow puddles.

2] To maintain focus on the three pockets, this was cropped to a slight panoramic from the original frame size. It cropped out some distracting elements and emphasized the flow to me. Looking through the viewfinder, I already knew this was going to be cropped for the slight panoramic.

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