Autumn is a time for a lot of nature to start their endless cycle of regeneration, losing their old coats before gaining their new coats in Spring. So this shot was made in the spirit of capturing the sense of the twilight period that Autumn heralds.
The shot was made with my wife's Chinese Elm bonsai as the main subject and, sadly, it is losing its leaves this year, probably as it lived in the garden for a period this year. The tree was shot from below the bowl it is in and up into an orange sheet of paper that was lit from behind by firing a flashgun with an orange filter into an umbrella. The objective was to set the bonsai into a near silhouette with the background dominating the colour.
Post processing was relatively simple with a crop, the background taken into a separate layer and smoothed with increased saturation, and then the image collapsed, ninja'd, usm'd and sized for the web.
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The background here does not work at all. I think had this been presented as a silhouette, with the tree being stark black against such an eye searing wall of red, it would have worked much better. As it is, the mass of red color just works against the subject, making its surface appear washed out and lacking in detail. Good luck.
i think this would have been a bit more effective if it was a really solid silhouette; i think the red background would have set that off really well, and a posh wallpaper company might have used it as a print. as it is, it's still rather striking; the red is really lovely and bold. very likeable; 7.
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