Fern close-up

Yesterday I brought inside a fern frond to photograph. Well, it looked better outside than it did when I began examining it up close inside. The weather's making the ferns look a bit weathered and tattered, and not in an "artsy" sort of way. So I zoomed in tightly to capture just a bit of it. I used a 50mm lens and a 35mm extension tube because that's what was on the camera. Usually I use this lens/XT combo to take shallow depth-of-field photos, but this time I set the aperture for f/11 to make sure everything was sharp. During the 1.3-second exposure, I waved around some brown leaves in the background to add color and shadowing. One light from the right lighted the fern, as well as track lights from above. ©Carol Leigh