Sunlight through young leaves of a Red Oak - Happy Spring!
Continuing the Spring theme, the Red Oaks are leafing out with new leaves.  Our Red Oaks here will cycle through to late November when the leaves turn a bright red and stay that way up to Christmas.  They are our Christmas trees.

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<b>Photographer Notes:</b> Thinking I was shooting into the sun, I tried this image two ways.  First, a range of single shots at a few different exposure settings.  Second, a series of 3 images bracketed in the typical +/-2ev settings for HDR processing.  I went through the HDR process first and got decent results since there was no breeze moving the leaves.  Then went to a single image and got the same color results but a sharpness and no noise that could not be obtained with the HDR.  The only thing the HDR gave me was detail on the underside of the branches but that gave nothing to this particular image.  So this time, the single image wins.  HDR has its place and with any new tool, our challenge is knowing when and how to use it.

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