Simple Photography Tips For You - Noticing leaves

Eight Simple Photography Tips on Photographing spring leaves - Camera and Phone Camera

• Go for a walk and focus on one or two different plants and their leaves

• Look for colours, but green is great

• Leaf veins are a wonderful source of interest

• Look for sunlight lighting up leaves from the back

• Use leaves to create abstract art

• You don't need sunlight, shade is fine, and the colours can be more saturated

• Experiment

• It's very easy to get distracting background - just check and reshoot if necessary

Todays Simple Photography Tips came from amble through the beauty of an English spring started when my wife dropped the dog and me in the next village down, with the aim of the both of us getting our daily walk done.

As you know I'm sharing the idea that you need to look before you see, often looking a long time before you really start to see.

This particular morning, cool, sunny and smelling of spring, I started to see how much the leaves were advancing. Almost surging from the ground, the wild garlic, bluebells, arum, cow parsley, all as yet devoid of flowers, throw patterns towards the light. Then there are such as the celandine and primrose, whose yellow shades have charmed us for a number of weeks, but whose leaves were what drew my 'seeing' this wonderful morning.

So let's talk leaves. Perhaps you know much more than I, which would not be difficult, but perhaps I can share a few morsels to inspire your images.

The first plant is Cow Parsley Anthriscus sylvestris, whose flowers, if kindly left by the council, will line many a roadside in white. The leaves, which indeed do look much like the parsley we are used to adding to our food.

I've included three images to give three immediate thoughts. Image One shows how the use and placing of sunlight, with the associated extremes of light and shade can be used to highlight the texture of the leaves.

Image One - Cow Parsley Anthriscus sylvestris with quite fussy lighting.

Image Two, with a completly different lighting, clearly a bright day somewhere, but not in the shade where I photographed, has led to completely different texture, much more gentle. allowing the fullness of colour to develop. Also notice how the depth of field has separated to top leaf, but kept some of the texture as a background.

Image Two - Cow Parsley Anthriscus sylvestris, shaded but bright light nearby

Image Three, shows leaves that are a bit more 'grown-up', the softness has been replaced by harder lines and crisper edges. As an aside, I might have been tempted to move the blade of grass that overlaps the Cow Parsley, but the sparkly dewdrop added a little charm, at least to my mind, so I left it.

Image Three - Cow Parsley Anthriscus sylvestris older leaf with flatter light

Image Four, well this is very different, and illustrates how much a change, in direction and light, will produce a very different image.

Image Four - Cow Parsley Anthriscus sylvestris taken from the side

It's so much fun to realise that as you walk and look, you can choose to focus on something very ordinary, and as you carry on walking and looking you start to see that plant in so many different ways.

Going for a walk this week? Stroll awhile, seeing what you notice - anything in particular take your attention? - then discard the other distractions (not completely maybe), focus your looking, and you will see so much - loads of opportunites for interesting, eclectic images.

An example of this occurred on the same walk, I was very aware of how many dock leaves there were, but to be honest they don't float my visual boat very often - so I was determined to spend at least some of my time looking for opportunites.

Image Five, is really included to ensure you know the plant I'm talking about - the Broad Leaved Dock Rumex obtusifolius - there are many varieties of dock, so perhaps even set yourself a challenge to find and photograph them.

Image Five - Broad Leaved Dock Rumex obtusifolius General view

Image Six is getting in closer, having looked for the most attention grabbing opportunites, and seen this wonderful emrging leaf with it's intense red veining. I did take one quite similar but somehow it lacked the punch of this one, and the background was more boring - this one includes aspects of older leaves with their pock-marks and holes.

Image Six - Broad Leaved Dock Rumex obtusifolius Red veins on young leaf

Image Seven, is a good example of looking and waiting until you see. It's really only now as I'm writing this that I'm noticing as much. Have a look with me. The central vein, with it's stripes, but shaded. The two halves of the leaf lit in completely different ways, the left more stunning, but the right not without visual drama.

Let your eye be drawn to the edge of the leaf, and the less focused one behind, as I stare I'm drawn to the cleft between them, and how it highlights the edge.

Image Seven - Broad Leaved Dock Rumex obtusifolius Mixed lighting detail

Image eight, is the very antithesis of seven, with surface sunlight changing the green to almost white as it reflects. I was intrigued by the hole in the leaf - some little critter nibbling - with thedges now healed. Placing the hole on the interesting third ensures it has a relevance.

It would make an equally interesting image if cropped in much tighter, removing the dark at the top and to the left.

Image Eight - Broad Leaved Dock Rumex obtusifolius surface sunlight with sparkly reflection

Image Nine is probably the one I'd choose to display, the angle of the light, the spread of the colurs and the drama of the veining. The real fun of how to photograph leaves.

Image Nine - Broad Leaved Dock Rumex obtusifolius Details of the veining

And a final simple photography tip - try turning some images to monochrome, they can be stunning.