Palm Tree

I began my observation in the mid-late afternoon at around 5 pm.  The sky was mostly clear, but there were a couple of clouds in the sky.  My subject was a small palm tree I found in my apartment complex.  It wasn't around any other palm trees, but it was around some shrubs and the height of the apartment buildings offered some shade.  The color of the palm leaves were a mix of greens that was cool on one side (bluer greens) and warm on the other (yellower greens) where the sun was hitting it directly.  Weirdly, the leaves on the cooler side had a lot more white, specular reflection than those on the warm side, and the light seemed more diffused.  The undersides of the leaves looked more yellowy, probably because of green light of the topside from the layer of of leaves below bouncing back up.  There are no sharp shadows anywhere, but the trunk did cast a pretty distinct shadow.  Although the wind was basically still when I began my observation, the wind made the leaves wiggle a lot in the middle of my observation, and so the soft shadows of the leaves gently shifted (which only really affected the other leaves, as there were no real dark shadows cast by the leaves).  By the end everything looked cooler.  I think the movement of the clouds caused the subtle shift in light intensity.  The light from the sun no longer hit the one angle so directly because it was diffused by clouds.  It wasn't until around the end that I noticed the sun was reflecting intensely from a window across the street, causing reflections on the cooler leaves.

I had a little technical difficulty which made me wait a couple of extra minutes before I could take the second video, but I wasn't too late for the light quality to have changed too much.

 

Palm Tree from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.