Autumn Approaches

With autumn rapidly drawing nearer I thought a couple of shots of frosty things would be fun to share.  I don't feel either of these are truly perfect but I like them none-the-less.  Both shots were taken in December 2010 at around 1100.  The light was probably fairly flat, but I can't say I remember taking these two!

The first image is of some nettles, I liked the way the frost made the patterns stand out on the leaves.  They were shot at f6.3 and 1/200th of a second at ISO 400 using my long lens at maximum zoom of 500mm.  I can't remember why this combination, but it seemed to work!  I didn't use any flash and was using my old EOS450D.  The lowish f-number (as low as I can get on that lens with the selected zoom) nicely blurs the background.

Post processing on this consisted of cropping to remove some distracting leaves below and converting from RAW to JPEG.  If I was to take this again then I would carry out a little gardening as the distracting nettles I've cropped out have meant I have lost the tip of the lowest leaf.  I would also have removed the nettle from the top corner and the large leaf on the left.

My second image is of some old, overwintering plant.  I'm not sure what it was!  I liked the monochrome effect of the image, it's hard to tell but it is actually brown and grey, not a true black and white!

This was shot using almost the same settings as the one above but a slightly quicker shutter speed of 1/250th of a second.  Post processing has been very minimal to this, only adding my watermark.  The problem that I see with this image, apart from the branch to nothing on the right, is the fact that the top of the shoot is out of focus.  A wider depth of field should have been used to keep the whole plant sharp.