Abstract Thursday..."Change"

My Editor came to the rescue again, with an idea for Ingeborg's Abstract Thursday challenge on the theme of "Change".

Even though it's still just spring/early summer, some trees have yellowing leaves on them: this is a shot of one of our holly trees which, although being evergreens, always have a period at this time of year when they lose some old leaves while growing new ones.

Initially I took some "normal" photos, intending to subject them to some "abstractifying" Photoshop abuse. But then I thought, "Why not use my Helios lens?". Normally I've used it to produce swirling bokeh, but that didn't seem to work well on this shot - however if you adjust the aperture and focus you can get a variety of different bokeh effects. It's great fun to experiment with! So apart from tweaks to clarity, texture and vibrance in Lightroom, and a bit of exposure tweak too, this is straight-out-of-camera.

(PS. I've just looked at Ingeborg's blip entry for today and noticed that she had the same idea...I didn't copy, honest! "Great minds think alike", of course. But at least we ended up with quite different effects.)