The Making of an Image - Leaf and Stream

"Leaf and Stream" is a photograph that I took several years ago visiting Snowdonia National Park in Wales. I was on a business trip to Birmingham and after the conference loaded my stuff up into the rental car and zipped over to the mountains. Snowdonia was on my shortlist of places to visit since seeing the terrain from a flight to Dublin.

A small river flows next to A470 and this photo was taken near Ganllwyd. As it was after sunset speed of operation was vital. At first I was photographing the riverscape with a wideange when this leaf was spotted sitting on the moss-covered rock. I mounted the Zuiko 100/2.8 to the Olympus OM-2S and placed the camera in Auto-exposure mode. The exposure is approximately 30 seconds long and the aperture probably around F8.

One hazard in making a time-exposure picture of flowing water is getting a loss of texture. The water, in this case, was full of bubbles so it created a nice movement to the image.

The Fujichrome Provia was scanned using the Nikon Coolscan V-ED and VueScan software. Cropping, spotting and tonal adjustments were performed in Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0.