Still life, Apple with leaf

very nice playing around...


Miles

Great.

I feel fortunate that the lens maintained its butter-smooth transitions from in-focus to out-of-focus even stopped down this much. The apple is at least lifesize on the negative, maybe even a bit bigger, and this is not a macro lens by any stretch of the imagination.

Very nicely composed and printed, Scott. Your lighting is great too. It maybe just me, but I find the transition to out of focus in the foreground a bit uncomfortable though. Maybe it's because there's so much OOF foreground or maybe it's just the scan, I'm not sure. Either way it pulls my eye to the bottom away from the gorgeous apple.

I wonder whether a smoother surface would have worked better so the OOF foreground would be less noticeable, but the wonderful soft edge in the background left unchanged. Either that or perhaps raising the camera so there's less foreground and more of the powerful darkness above.

Does this make sense or am I rambling?

Ian- I understand what you mean. I wanted the tonal split between the dark and the light, and if I recall the logistics of the shot, the splat of the back of the chair would have shown had I raised the camera more. A smoother surface may have been better, but given that I had to raise the apple off the cushion of the chair to get the apple to camera's eye level (the camera was lowered as low as my stand would go, then tilted down to aim it at the apple better), a smoother surface may have been too slick and I wouldn't have been able to get the apple to stay put.

You're right, and of course it's your photo not mine What I didn't say was that the way you've lit the leaf is superb - I love the texture you've produced. I feel inspired to try some more pears!