Fall Leaves, Catch Em While You Can

I wandered around the garden yesterday, photographing with both the D800E and my Nex-7 - adaptor and the Nikon fit 35 mm. Lensbaby Composer. I then extended my search to the back lane and found this interesting plant across the alley. Timing was everything as there was no wind at all and I was able to use the D800E, tripod, base ISO and a relatively small f-stop.

In processing the image, I duplicated the image and then used field blur to add a a little more background blur, left upper corner and left lower corner and upper centre - each controlled to taste. Then I masked it black and used the paint brush to apply the effect just where I wanted (and to the degree I wanted) to give this natural look (better than gaussian blur that I have used in the past.

Today the wind is blowing, there's several inches of snow on the ground and more coming down, and zero change of making an image like this, possibly for the next year or more.