Autumn Acer Abstracts

Recently I went to the fabulous Autumn Garden at Queenswood Country Park near Hereford.  One feature of that part of the wood is the Japanese Maples.  They were in full colour and looked fantastic.  It was a sunshine and showers day, so there were lots of water droplets around.

I had my Olympus macro lens on, so set my camera to manual focus and defocussed the image.  I concentrated on a small part of a maple that had dissected leaves.  The shapes and colours  of the leaves, and the water droplet highlights, made for a very pleasing abstract composition.

I had my trusty Huawei mobile with me and couldn’t resist using “Silky Water” mode and moving the camera during the exposure. Using this technique and standing a few yards away from the tree gave an image full of colour and movement.  It’s not obvious what the subject is, but it doesn’t matter.

Getting closer to the tree, and holding the camera still for part of the exposure gave more recognisable shapes to the leaves.  To me it looks like dancing flames.

I’m planning to run a one-day woodland photography workshop there.  It will cover such things as composition, movement and macro.  If you are interested drop me an email to info @ galephotography.co.uk (take out the spaces) and I’ll let you know when I have a date sorted.