The Monomagician

Why is it that large organisations feel the need to involve all sorts of people in issues that frankly, they have no understanding of and can add absolutely no value to. Why also do these people then feel the need to “get to the bottom” of a problem. Not necessarily to learn what the root cause was, but to find out who’s to blame?

There are times when I detest working for a large organisation and not surprisingly, today was one of those times.

You can imagine how happy I was when lunchtime came around and after a quick sandwich, was able to take a walk outside with my Canon G9. The light was pretty awful. Yesterday was what I call a ‘glad to be alive day’ owing to the crisp air and blue skies. Today was an altogether greyer affair.

Just as I reached the end of my walk around the perimeter of my workplace, I spotted a single leaf stuck in a chainlink fence. The camera was out of my pocket in a flash. I had in mind a monochrome image with the backlit leaf standing out from the hedge behind and the tones and hardness of the chainlink fence contrasting with the delicacy of the leaf.

The exposure was made with -1EV worth of exposure compensation to tame the highlights at the top of the picture. I didn’t want to go any lower as I wanted to keep the noise levels down to a manageable level as I was already shooting at ISO 200 to make sure I could use a decent shutter speed.

I processed the image in Lightroom. There’s quite a steep curve - partly to emphasise the mid-tones and also to lower the values of the darks tones and shadows. I also played with the contrast a bit to harden the image and accentuate the chain link and make the leaf stand out a touch more. Finally, I tweaked the green and yellow channels to bring out the leaf a bit more.

The final image is shown below.

Leaf in Chainlink Fence.

If you want to see more pictures a week taken in 2008, please visit Mark’s Picture a Week Pages

I felt much, much better for my walk and knowing I had a reasonably good shot in the bag made the afternoon a much more pleasant proposition.

A decent swim after work helped too!

The final print, made onto Permajet 271 Oyster paper shows a full range of tones and there is plenty of detail in the leaf structure.
I’m in two minds as to whether it’s worth putting on to fibre paper. I think I’ll mull that over with a glass of Speyside Single cask whisky.