The Last of Autumn

Also taken with my 85mm at f/1.8 to get the shallow depth of field. 

One thing I sometimes love, sometimes hate about living in California is that our seasons get all wonky. For example, here it is December, almost January, almost 2011, and we still have leaves on the trees that look like this. And no snow. At least not here in the Bay Area. In other parts of the country, leaves that look like this are long gone.

Anyway, when shooting leaves it's always best to shoot them backlit so that you can get some of the beautiful veins and structure to show up in the photo. So I found an angle on this one that let me shoot into the light, and that had a relatively clean background. Then I did a little exposure and curves adjustments in Lightroom and Photoshop, and voila! an image that I am very happy with. It's a great orange.