Silvery Leaves

The leaves were green, in different shades of the colour. I did my best to show them in

b&w maintaining the difference in luminance. Exposure: normal, at box speed,

development: N+1.

Any comments and/or critique appreciated.

Nice picture, I like the leaves in the foreground which are very sharp

Gianluigi

I love this kind of B&W that takes advantage of the different shades of green in the foliage (and I love leaves, too), so this one attracted me immediately!  The composition is pleasing, as is the sense of depth. 

I'm wondering, though, if you might even be able to do a bit more with this image, to take your original idea even further.  I think you could accentuate the silveryness of the leaves even more by doing a couple of things.  One possibility would be to bring down the midtones in the lower 3/4 of the image (keeping the darkest areas in the upper 1/4 pretty much as is).  This might set off the lighter leaves a little better, make them more prominent against the only slightly darker leaves with which they're now competing.  A selective Multiply layer (with a fairly low opacity) for just those 2 or 3 lightest/frontmost leaves would make their vein structure more prominent and add to the silvery effect.  And finally, just a tiny bit of warm toning might give even more of a silvery effect.  I hope you don't mind these suggestions, and I know one person's vision of things is not always another's!  Here is what I was thinking of (and if you object in any way to my having worked with/displayed your image I will immediately remove it):

http://spector.smugmug.com/Before-and-After/Before-and-After/i-g5z7P7W/0/M/leavesbeforeandafter-M.jpg

Elisabeth

Tomasz,

Well I just noticed that this is a film image, not digital!  So you may ignore my previous comments as they apply to digital processing.  It's still a lovely image, either way, and I've greatly enjoyed looking at it.