As a recap of “Season 1,” I started a project photographing leaf creatures in my yard last year. It was an attempt not only to see the individual character of each of these leaves but to let your imagination run wild to see them as something else. I really wasn’t sure if I would continue the project into another year, but here we are.

Here is a video recap of last season if you missed it the first time:

Just a couple of days prior to the recent Autumn Equinox, I was sitting at a table in our yard watching our dogs play like the fur demons they are. The table sits beneath one of the trees in our yard that spawns these creatures. There was the leaf in the featured image of this post sitting there on the table – staring at me – as if it were saying “Pssssst – hey, you didn’t get any pictures of us with tails did ya?“

As a matter of fact, the little snarky antagonistic leaf creature was right! I didn’t photograph any with tails. I suppose I didn’t find any that looked like they should have a tail, until now. While watching fur demons run around taking turns chomping on each other’s hind ends makes for some suitable entertainment, my role as safety monitor lent itself to some extra time for a few photos.

Then, when you find one with a suitable tail, you are bound to find a few others. Being early in the leaf creature deployment season, there are different color variations to explore in addition to tails. So I found enough to keep me photographing for an hour or so while trying to remember all the technical details of how exactly I made these images last time.

Focus-stacking comes into play again, and the tails just add more to the stacks – resulting in the need for about 30 exposures for each leaf. Focus bracketing is one of the features of my Fuji XT2 that I really like – which makes me reach for it over my Nikon D810 for this type of work. Both are considered fairly old cameras these days but still serve my needs well. As long as I can make a good guess about how many exposures will be needed to cover the depth of field I need, the camera and using Helicon Focus to merge them take some of the work out of the process.

The tails reminded me of dinosaur species, like Ankylosaurus, that have club tail weapons. This brought back some early childhood memories of having little plastic dinosaurs to play with – imagining them challenging each other to duels. I am glad canines never evolved these traits – it would take current yard play to another level. 🙂