I haven’t had many opportunities to get out and shoot this year and even some of the times I have gone out I felt less productive than normal. There is a pressure I put on myself to try to capture something interesting and worthy of a place in the portfolio.
I do realize that there is no sense in stressing over images that need not be perfect every time I click the shutter. What helps is finding positives in images that I capture that aren’t perfect. This image exemplifies that because it is not technically perfectly sharp.
Yes, it holds up when viewed fairly large, but it definitely has a falloff towards the top as I ran out of the depth of field on the upper edge of frame. While I wish I had endless sharpness it was a balance of two things and I made the compromise in aperture. The leaves were moving downstream, it was shot at a long focal length, and I was already at a high ISO for the cloudy morning and the background would become noisy if I bumped it higher.
Given all of these “issues” with the image technically, it still holds up in capturing the mood and demonstrates the idea. The water made for a dark and deep cool backdrop for the warm fall tones in the leaves to sit against. The ripples from Oregon’s late fall/early winter rainstorms are what create that last layer of complexity and depth.
Overall, I think it is an image I can look back on with a strong sense of pride. Seeing something like this and being able to capture the subtle beauty of this area was wonderful!