Autumn shadows, leaves ... and a foot

 

While patiently waiting this week for more leaves to turn colors so I can do a thorough autumn shoot, I amused myself yesterday by exploring the "live" feature on my iPhone 11's camera. 

Keep in mind, I've been aware of "live" function on the camera for some time, but I just wasn't sure what it was there for, and I decided to see if I could find any practical use for it. I succeeded Wednesday.

I activated "live" while I took pictures of leaves and some interesting shadows the trees on the property were casting onto the main driveway of the house. While walking forward to get a better composition, I noticed the live feature on as I took a shot. I left it on and took some more photos, including some in which I noticed that one of my feet was creeping into the bottoms of some of the composition because I had the lens focal range set to wide open. 

The foot's role as a composition ingredient intrigued me, so I kept them in the pictures ... and also took some shots of my heel meeting pavement simultaneous to the foot/heel shadow version. After shooting, I settled into a comfy chair on the back deck to edit the pictures in-camera (phone?). 

When I pulled up the first image to assess, I noticed a mini "live" feature icon at the bottom left right above a multitude of frames that I could not make out because they were so small. I swiped through the frames, and as I did, I noticed a rapid display of sundry images on the main display area of the phone. A light bulb went on. Those were the various images captured with each "live" composition I had taken. 

When I found a frame I liked most from each composition, I pushed the "make key image" button, which I was presuming meant that I was telling the phone that of all the couple dozen images the phone captured in live mode, that's the one I wanted to edit and make the official shot of the composition. Turns out, I was right. So I did that for all of the other live compositions I made from my brief shoot. And I am presenting those in this post. 

I lead off with a foot-less shot of the shadows on the driveway, followed below by a few more footless shots and ending with a series of foot-in shots, including one in which I deliberately tried to line up the foot shadow parallel to the long tree trunk shadow. 

Just some leaves and shadows (above), and below, a reprise of the lead photo only from a slightly different vantage point.

I'm lining up my foot to be parallel to the long pine tree trunk in the above photo. Below, I'm simply planting the foot in the thinning area of leaf shadows in a wide-angle composition drawing in the driveway's full length.

Above and next three below: Variations of where I place the heel of my foot in relation to the thinning or dense areas of the tree leaf shadows. 

Here's the composition (above) where my aim was to compose around the point where leg and shoe heel meets leg and shoe heel shadow. 

       

Autumn colors just starting here in NC

 

I've heard (and seen, through pictures) from my friends and family back in Indiana that fall colors there are in full glory, which is not surprising. I recall taking a swing through Indy's Garfield Park on this very date in 2004, and the colors were vibrant that day.

Leaves are just now starting to turn colors here in North Carolina. Leaves on trees are still mostly green, but fallen leaves -- as you can seen in the pictures in this post -- are colorful. The second photo below, which focuses on the leaves on the roof alongside my office window -- are almost all yellow, orange or brown. 

It has been a while since I added a post to my "View from the Office Window" series, so I figured these would be a nice change of pace, at least short term. This was a quick turn-around; I shot these pics with my iPhone 11 only 10 minutes before I activated this post. That might just be a speed record for Photo Potpourri. 

If nothing else, the pictures show how foliage on the Crepe Myrtle tree just outside my office has gotten denser still the last "View from the Office Window" post, leaving me little open view of the detached garage in the distance. 

I have been immersed in several projects for the past few months. The that has consumed most of my team mostly involved writing, but there were some pictures involved as well. I completed that project early this month. 

Two of the projects I'm currently juggling involve lots of pictures, although none of them are from recent or new photo shoots. All of these projects are keeping me busy in my mostly stay-at-home days while riding out the COVID-19 pandemic. 

I'll be presenting samples of one of those picture projects in this blog in the next week or so. This project entails revisiting a photo shoot from 2011.  

In the interim, enjoy this small and brief glimpse of a North Carolina autumn in COVID 2020.