Leaf Banding

At first I posted this image with only the paragraph below. My apologies. Read it if you are interested. If you are not, don't bother. I am peculiarly interested in photography's technical issues but most sane people (of course) don't care for them. For the "Big Bang Brigade" I have posted a more full explanation under Miffy's comment below.  

You can't often see banding as clearly as this. Eight bit jpegs (as opposed to  sixteen bit tif masters) always have the potential to reveal banding in stressed gradients but when you posterize the number of grey shades to 14, the bands become distinct enough to be pretty. At least that's what I thought.