I was walking through my office building at Microsoft today when I passed the reception and main entrance.  This guy came in (a developer I think) carrying a single red leaf that he’d picked up off the floor outside.  Anyway he looked at me a little embarrassed and said “perfect leaf – shows that summer is definitely over”.  Both he and I got into an elevator and went up to the third floor.  All the time he’s looking at the leaf, clearly fascinated by the color.

Now 18 year old Tony would have been laughing his head off, I can hear my younger self now in my head, I was so embarrassing.  I probably would have made some derogatory comment to the guy about how stupid he was or something.  But these day’s being much older (50 next year), I can appreciate the beauty in a simple leaf and I started thinking.  At home we have the very cute little Japanese Maple tree (Lisa loves this tree) and this week the leaves have turned from their normal deep purple to this amazing red color (clearly they are soon going to fall).  And all of a sudden all I can think of is how much I want to shoot a single leaf when I get home.

At 6pm I walked in the door and after a quick “Hello everyone” ran into the back yard to find that “perfect” leaf.  I’m not sure if the one I selected was perfect but it looked great and I picked it off the tree.  It was raining outside so it was pretty wet and covered in water droplets and that looked great too.

Anyway I brought the leaf in and set up a little set to shoot it.  I had a light stand supporting a 40″ reflector with a black cover – that was going to be my backdrop.  I got another stand to support the leaf, and placed the macro lens on the camera and got out the tripod.

I used a single speed light to light the leaf and took a number of pictures.  Now they all looked nice but they were missing something.  Then I realized what it was, the leaf was now dry.  So I grabbed a spray water bottle an started to cover the leaf with water until a number of drops moved together and started to drip from the leaf.  Then I got the shot below.

I did very little to this picture, maybe increased the contrast a little but that was it.  I think I ended up with a keeper!  I love the red color on black, and the water drop about to come off the bottom leaf just draws my eye.  Hope you like this one too.

Sometimes I have no idea what these guys are doing, tonight it appears that Master Chief was trying to hatch a chicken egg by sitting on it in a birds nest he found!  Carter was shocked by this too!