The very first warm rays of New Year’s sun brought up the red under the frost in these beach-rose leaves, giving them the look of a confection. I backed off and used the long end of the zoom from 4.5 feet to throw the background well out of focus and –isolate the arrangement of leaves and berries. I used a Canon SX40HS super-zoom point and shoot camera with a real focal length only 150mm…so I got the depth of field of a moderate telephoto and the image scale of an 840mm lens. Best of both worlds.

This was just at dawn, so the exposure was f5.8 @ 1/100th @ ISO 800. This kind of shot is not possible without the excellent image stabilization of the Canon lens (handholding 840mm equivalent), and the excellent high ISO performance of the sensor which maintains color and detail without adding a lot of noise.

Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.