Tech Info: Single shot with Nikon D300s, 70-300 @300 mm, ISO 250, f/5.6 for 1/250 sec.
Winter Berries – There are huge amounts of shrubs around Foster City which has these winter berries. I see it every single day and especially through a route which I usually take to drop my kid to school. One such spot has these berries at an angle to sunlight which is just gorgeous. The light is more on the light-green shades of grass and this makes it a very interesting background to have. This was shot pretty recently and the light on that day was really awesome.
Usually higer apertures are best suited for single themes and in this case my subject was just the berries. The effect of shooting with a high f-stop is that you get shallow depth of field (DoF). So the background would be completely out of focus. If you pay attention to what is in the background, then you can really come with some striking images. In this image, the berries in isolation is just another set of berries. But when combined with a brighter green/yellow background, the color of the berries stand out. So it does help to pay attention to the background even when you are shooting with shallow DoF.
Processing:
- Import the raw file into Lightroom and get some basic adjustments.
- Open the image as smart-object in Photoshop.
- Clean up the slightly distracting element to the left of the frame.
- A curves layer for brightening the berries as the light was hitting behind them.
- Crop the image to a squarish format.
- Resize the image for web and add a smart-sharpen filter.
- Added copyright and saved as jpeg.
- Added metadata and keywords in Bridge.
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