One of the scenes we expect to see in some areas during autumn are all the leaves falling from the trees. And perhaps we have a desire to capture some of the leaves on camera, as they are falling, to freeze that action and show the leaf midway to the ground. How do we do that? Well, there are a number of ways, but today we’ll take a light hearted look at one particular method that if I’m honest with you, might be considered cheating. But I ended up having a lot of fun with it, just the same.

Take a close look at the photos in this post. Do you notice anything strange or unusual about the leaves you see, each hanging in mid-air? I will say there was no cheating in software. This was all done in camera and the leaves were each captured mid-air. This also didn’t involve multiple exposures. Each photo is a single exposure, with no in-camera “trickery.”

This technique won’t work with every falling leaf. In fact, it will only work with a very small and rare subset of leaves. It’s not specific to any particular shape, species or color of leaf. But it does depend a bit on location, and involves a fair bit of luck and perhaps a bit of effort searching for those special leaves.

Have you figured out how it was done? If not, I’ll give one last clue. Click on the photos to open them in a larger view. Then look closely around each leaf. Do you see it? Last chance before I tell you how it’s done.

Ready? Ok. We found each of these leaves hovering right in front of us along the trail. They had been falling at one point, but when we found them they’d at least temporarily stopped their falling and just hovered there. How can that be? Well, the woods are full of spiders and many spiders build webs between trees along the trail. I’ve often walked right into these spider webs, sometimes later finding the spider crawling on my clothing. Well, in this case a leaf happed to get caught by some of the spider silk, and the silk was strong enough to stop the falling of the leaf, so now it hovers there, resisting gravity, slowing swaying or twirling in any light breeze. Each time I found a leaf like this I took advantage of it and created a few photographs to show the leaf hovering in the air.

See? You don’t need any fancy gear to capture a falling leaf in a photo. Just a bit of luck and good observational skills finding those rare leaves that have been captured by spider silk. 😁

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