Lessons Learned: Focus

Another good title for this lesson might be "Work the location." In this case, I arrived before dawn at the old Orland cemetery where I'd noticed some exceptionally bright-colored foliage. I shot my pictures of the trees, then observed that the 30-degree morning had left a light fringe of frost on the leaves that had fallen to the ground.

That observation initiated a search for unique images among the diverse collection of leaf types, colors, frost intensity and ground cover opportunities.

This composition of a solitary maple leaf, partially turned to gold before falling to the ground, and the intricate and colorful ground cover beneath it, offers a close-up, focused look at an image of nature so small that it could easily have been destroyed by a single footstep.

My Lesson Learned on that morning featured the close, intimate inspection of tiny subjects within larger subjects (the cemetery itself is quite a scene from rustic New England) and an almost macro-photography look at them.