"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain." - Henry David Thoreau There are certain things that scream out to photographers as subjects for their picture taking. The Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, a peacock, a spectacular sunset. They are obvious subjects for a variety of reasons - uniqueness, size, color, etc. Nothing wrong with that - I'm as susceptible to their call as anyone. And you can always try to find a new point of view, take advantage of an unusual quality of light, crop it creatively, or find a way to postwork it to make it uniquely your own. Or, in the worst case, you can just resign yourself to taking a head on shot that will be virtually identical to the one that thousands of others have taken before. But I get a special kind of satisfaction from finding something relatively common that I might not notice under most circumstances & photographing it in a way that celebrates it's unique beauty. That's why I like this shot so much. I hike often & pass thousands of leaves on the ground & on trees & don't pay attention to them (as a practical matter, I wouldn't have time for anything else in my life if I stopped to examine each one!). I could easily have passed this one by or accidentally crushed it underfoot, but for some reason this decomposing leaf caught my attention. I hope others can see what I saw in it...