This morning it look as though rain was coming (it was), so I walked outside to scout. Yesterday I was working along the County ditch and saw some interesting moss/rock combinations (the County can built very nice ditches when it feels like it . . . on this street, it's made of fitted lava rock) and so I spent some time shooting the ditch walls. Then -- as used to happen regularly back in Colden -- when I headed inside I looked over to the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) and there were some new leaves that stood out against the normal green ones. So I walked over there to shoot the leaves. When I got there, I realized that the red leaf/green leaf combo I'd seen wasn't very interesting, but that the red leaves against the bamboo I have yet to dispose of, and the rest of the border, had a lot of potential because the lens I had on the camera could compress/flatten the shot in a way that I like.
With a project like mine if I only think of subjects I'll run out of ideas quickly. Leaves, flowers, rocks, human objects, and the wide or long views are always the same. So that leaves me with light, perspective, shape, texture, focus/depth of field, and color.
Color drew me to these leaves, but it was perspective and focus that made the shot. Because I was using the tripod (this is a 1/4" exposure) I could choose any aperture and thus keep the leaves in sharp focus while throwing the two masses of color and shape more or less out of focus. I experimented with aperture (f/2.8 through f/11), to get the background looking the way I wanted it to. This is f/5.6, which gave only enough detail on the bamboo to suggest that there's a pile of long objects in the background. This is 200 mm, if you care, and the bamboo was featured in the 2014 08 03 HDI.