Silhouetted Tree

As I took an evening walk around the perimeter of my apartment complex, I came across a really nice image of a tree branch full of leaves silhouetted against the sky.  I really liked the dark quality of the picture, so I decide to use it as another light observation.  As it was the last time I tried to find a subject in natural light this late in the day, manmade lamps are nearly unavoidable.  However, the tree I am looking at does not have very much manmade light hitting it directly.  In fact, this side of the street has no lamps, making for a relatively dark area compared to the light on the other side, where lamps are distributed about every 20 feet.  Tonight, the sky is pretty cloudy, but bluish white light of the moon pokes through every so often.  The sky looks like a desaturated shade of purple or lavender, with the smokey clouds influencing the way it appears.  From where I stand the leaves of the branch I focus on appear almost black.  The little leaves on the left side of the branch are especially dark and look blackest, where as the leaves on the bottom right region look to be brown or even yellow.  At first I think this is an indication of the fall season and that the leaves are dying, but upon closer investigation they are actually quite healthy leaves that probably look green in daylight.  I can tell, however, that the leaves look brown/yellow as a result of the reflection bouncing back up from the grey/dirty street (probably an area of road in a pool of light from the lamps across the street).  There is no obvious cast shadow that I can see from these leaves specifically, but if I turn my head and look to the left behind me I can see the the shadows are long, dark, and sourced at the root of the tree.  The shadow from the leaves is probably somewhere far off behind me, give or take 20 feet.  I continue to watch the leaves as they move gently in the breeze.  Over time the moonlight's influence becomes more intense because the clouds move around, and the leaves on the left side pop out a bit more than they did before.  Also over time, the light on the leaves changes because of cars driving past in either direction, or the cars driving through the nearby intersection.  The lights from these are almost always blue-white, and the intensities from them vary as they move.  For example, the cars driving at the intersections only subtly cast a light on the edges of the leaves, making the individual leaves more apparent.  When cars pass on the street where the tree is, the leaves are nearly entirely illuminated by artificial light, making their color a washed out version of their green pigment.  By the end of my observation little has changed.

 

I had a little trouble capturing what I saw with my camera this time, primarily for lack of light.  I tried several settings and video settings, but in the end I think the only one to closely capture what I saw was the "foliage" setting of my camera (as it realized to open the aperture to f2.8 and used no flash).

Silhouetted Tree from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.