Autumn Leaves with Dew

A crisp, cool, sunny November morning on Long Island, with the autumn colors scattered across the backyard, providing me the opportunity to capture some of this fall color in a very up-close and personal way, with the use of a macro lens. The leaves that lay in the grass are from a Katsura tree in my backyard, an ancient tree from China. Its heart-shaped leaves give off a very sweet scent when they drop from the tree in Autumn – a scent similar to brown sugar, so lying on the cold ground to get this shot was made a bit more pleasant by the sweet scent of the leaves. There was a lot of dew on the ground, as it was early in the morning and the sun hadn’t yet evaporated the moisture. The morning light made the droplets of dew look almost like glass beads sitting on the leaf. The image was captured with the Canon EOS 7D and the EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. The ISO was set at 200 with a shutter speed of 1/500th sec, and an aperture setting of ƒ/2.8  to get a very shallow depth of field on the surface of the leaf, highlighting the glass-like droplets. The lens was focused manually so I could select the exact area I wanted sharp.

Camera:  EOS 7D
     Lens:  EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro
      ISO:  200
 Shutter:  1/500th
  F-Stop:  f/2.8