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.