Austral Autumn Still Life

Autumn Still Life, #2, Mendoza, Argentina, 2020

Here in Argentina, we are moving toward the end of November (in northern hemisphere seasonal language) and the leaves are flaming away. Very shortly, they will begin their Earth-bound pirouettes, combed loose by the first gusty cold fronts of winter.

Thus, today’s images.

Required items for this diversion: a few random gathered leaves, a black t-shirt, a camera of some kind, some soft light, and post-processing software.

I ran these images through the Color Efex Pro plugin, then manually painted the background a full 255-black using Adobe Photoshop Elements. There are quicker ways to replace the “almost black” of the t-shirt with solid black, but I have not yet learned how to control the edges as well as I can manually. It’s tedious by hand, but it’s also nice meditation time. 

Try this with whatever other objects you’d like to depict as “lost in space.”

Leaves, #6, Mendoza, Argentina, 2020

Leaves, #5, Mendoza, Argentina, 2020

The “studio” at rest. Note how not-black the t-shirt really is–although it does really help to give a head start when replacing the background in post. I used the Sony RX100ii pocket-sized camera for all of the above images:

The Cheapo Leaf Studio, Mendoza, Argentina, 2020