Creative with (Autumn) Leaves

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Nature is all the rage this (late) year. Add sunshine and pleasant temperatures, and the Indian Summer feeling is complete, even in the Netherlands! Unfortunately, autumn is now coming to an end and only the beech trees still have some fireworks in store for us.

Perhaps you also like spending time in the woods and autumn is your favourite season. Alongside the many mushrooms and beautiful idyllic paths, autumn leaves are also a great source of inspiration.

This time, they were the finely shaped beech leaves for me. Especially the leaf-within-leaf effect created by using multiple exposures in-camera.

With this, you layer two or more images on top of each other, which results in a new composite photo in your camera. Provided, of course, that your camera has this function. It takes quite a lot of puzzling to work out how to position the photos in relation to each other.

I had already looked up some examples that I wanted to work with. In practice, though, it turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. The first photos I took with a 24mm f/4.0 came close to what I wanted, but were still far too busy.

Using a macro lens (100mm) brought more calm to the image, as did using a minimal depth of field (f/2.8). I photographed the leaves from below against the sky, overexposing them by one or two stops.

To avoid getting a stiff neck, I lay down on the ground, which allowed me to experiment at my leisure with the leaves above me.

The feeling of lying flat on your back under a tree also gives you a youthful view of your surroundings, but that's beside the point. Oh yes, don't forget to put your hood up to keep the bugs off.

By starting with a single branch and letting it overlap itself or keeping it along the same line, the photo becomes much calmer. I always try to look for lines in the photo that lead the viewer through the image. In this photo, the beautiful colour transition from yellow-green to brown-red and the repetition of the leaves work well, but it still wasn't quite the effect I was looking for.

I thought this branch was a good starting point, so I looked for something else to layer over it. Something with smaller leaves. This immediately made the effect quite different.
Much more subtle and playful.

In post-processing, I made the photo a little lighter (+highlights) and emphasised the leaves more by adding shadows. You could still adjust the saturation to taste, but otherwise it didn't need any further editing.

Because I had saved both images, I wanted to see whether I could get the same result in Photoshop. I exported both photos as layers and then set the opacity of the top one to 50%. The result was reasonably similar, but that lovely feeling of lying flat on your back... was still not the same.

I hope I've given you some inspiration again. Head into the woods and enjoy these last days of autumn.

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