BROMELIAD IN THE ABSTRACT

Recently we acquired a bromeliad houseplant.  These tropical plants are relatives of the pineapple, which makes sense, given how stiff and waxen their top, colorful leaves are.  The plant we have stands about 18 inches high.

I thought the plant might make a nice photographic subject.  Given my penchant for abstracts, I decided to capture just parts of the colorful leaves, taking advantage of the varied colors and curves of the leaves.  Here is what I got.

These were extreme closeups taken with my macro lens only 2-3 inches from the leaves.  As a result, depth of field was extremely shallow, even when the camera was set at a very narrow aperture in order to maximize depth of field.  I decided that it was hopeless to keep everything in relatively good focus.  Instead, I focused on a leading edge of one of the leaves and let the remainder of the image fall out of focus.  By having a leaf edge in good focus served, I think, to preserve the idea that these were not just blurry images.  

Normally, when creating abstracts my goal is to retain enough so the subject matter is recognizable.  Here, I think the amount of abstraction makes the subject almost but not quite unrecognizable.  I particularly like these images, especially for their colors.

John M. Phillips

LEAVES IN THE WATER

One of the locations through which I take my daily walks is a natural area that has been preserved from development because it is a wetlands that, frankly, would be unbuildable anyway.  The area includes a small rill.  We have had an abundance of rain this spring, and on this morning I noted some water plants growing in a relatively still area adjacent to the rill.  Although the roots of the plants were under the water, the leaves were resting on top.  I liked the fact that the leaves were creating a pattern that was made more complex by the reflection of trees in the relatively still water.  After I finished my walk I returned with my camera to attempt to capture both the leaves and the reflections.

First, here is a shot of the rill, looking east toward the morning light.

Attempting to capture both the leaves and the reflections in the water was quite difficult from the point of view of depth of field.  Although the leaves and the reflections of trees would appear to be at the same distance from the camera, from the point of view of optics, the reflections are effectively as far away as the actual trees, that is to say, at a much greater distance.  So even taking shots with very narrow apertures (running from f/16 to f/40), left the reflections well out of focus.  And if I focused, instead, on the reflections, the leaves were badly out of focus, which was much worse from an esthetic point of view.

This first shot shows the general pattern of leaves that I had spotted.  The reflections of trees were largely lost among the leaves.  I underexposed this as well as the other leaf shots to darken the water, and that brought out a different pattern that I had not noted before.  Some sort of surface tension process was occurring, creating a series of concentric lines around the edges of the leaves.  These I enhanced a bit in post processing.

In the following shots I focused on smaller groupings of leaves which showed a bit better the surface tension effect.

Finally I got a shot that included both the surface tension effect and some recognizable (sort of) reflections from the trees.  This was taken at an extremely narrow aperture of f/40.  Even so, the tree reflections are very much out of focus.

John