P#19 Q6B: Capture the Shimmering Beauty of Fall Leaves

Just Say No To Polarizers

Jim Zuckerman: I'll tell you how you capture the shimmer of fall leaves, and its rather quite simple. Don't use a polarizing filter. The polarizing filter will diminish the shimmer of fall leaves because that shimmer is just a reflection of light on the leaves.

If you use a polarizing filter, you're going to cut that light down. If you don't use a polarizing filter, you'll be able to capture it.

More Creativity

Audri Lanford: What kind of creative technique have you used to render autumn leaves more like a painting?

Jim Zuckerman: One year, when I was photographing fall colors, I was in Vermont and I was really frustrated because it was raining. In a light rain, you can go out and shoot, but it was raining too hard so I was sitting in my car waiting for it to stop. I was parked in a little parking area and there was a beautiful stand of trees right in front of the car.

I was looking at them through the rainy windshield and I thought, "Wow, that looks like a painting." I turned my windshield wipers off and let the water run down the glass. When it was fully coated in this runny water, I sat in the driver's seat and shot the trees through this diffusion-like effect. It was absolutely beautiful.

I used 1/15th of a second because it was dark. It was a deep overcast, it was raining, and I didn't even use a tripod. How can you set up a tripod when you're sitting in a driver's seat? It was diffused enough and painterly enough that I could get away with 1/15th of a second because it's not a sharp shot anyway. It was a great technique.

Similarly, if you use a long exposure (half a second or a second) when it's windy, then you'll get the tree trunks being sharp but all the leaves will be blurred. It's very, very pretty.

If you really want to turn these images into paintings, you can use a program like Corel Painter. There's also a wonderful plug-in for Photoshop called Snap Art. It's made by Alien Skin. That has a huge number of filters built into it that can give you an endless number of painting styles for your fall colors.

To Conclude

Some times you have to work around obstacles to get the best shots, but sometimes obstacles create the best shots for you. When Jim Zuckerman was stuck in his car waiting for the rain to clear, he made lemonade from lemons and worked with what he had to create an artistic shot of fall leaves through a diffusion of water.