It seems I’ve been so caught up in the bigger landscapes that I’ve forgotten about the little stuff. A couple evenings ago I walked the bar ditches of a country road, sticking my nose in another world with a macro lens. I enjoyed myself until I knelt down in a patch of bull head stickers. I assume this caterpillar to be a moth rather than a butterfly. It was amazing to watch such a veracious eater, I had all the time I needed to shoot. Man did my knees hurt afterwards. Need to remember to take some knee pads or buy a longer macro.
I’m always looking for doors and church doors are even better. So while walking the streets of the towns I travel to, I make sure to keep my eye on doors.I took a bit of a different approach for this door by placing it in the background rather than the foreground. It doesn’t matter what church it is or what flower it is we just need to have our camera and be open to the muse.
… put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. – Dorothea Lange
A few days ago my sister and I noticed the petals of her flowers and the leaves, along with her lawn chairs, and everything else was covered with a golden dusting of pollen. Excitedly I grabbed the little G12 and crawled around in her yard. First over here the over there. I didn’t really care if I got any keepers, and I didn’t, but I was having fun, feeling like a little kid.
We may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. As a photographer learns to stop and take notice, we have the opportunity to make people notice, make people pay attention.
I do have a lot of images in my archives and am tempted to delete them and save disc space. However, before I deleted them I spent some time looking at the images I passed over asking myself several questions. What was there about the image I did not like? Did I expose it properly? How as the composition, the background? What could I do next time to improve it? And, what could I do now with the knowledge I’ve gained with software such as Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, that will improve what I’ve already got? It turned out to be a good exercise and was fun to experiment with Lightroom. this is one from the past. I cropped the image, adjusted the contrast, brush a bit more detail in the petals and posted it.
I thought this rose was so different in color. I also know that the colors of roses have certain meanings to them and I wondered what this color of a rose indicated? Here’s what I found. A red and yellow rose means : Jovial and Happy Feelings
I know this image is not very good but I decided to post it anyway. It is heavily cropped, grainy and not very sharp. So, why post a dud? Because it also reminds me of why I get out to shoot just as much as one of my better images. Paul Lester mentions why he presses the shutter in one of his blogs. He states, “Sometimes I don’t know why I click the shutter, but I just have to. And when that feeling hits, nothing but the click will do.” Man can I relate. I shoot and post images because of the change that occurs in me when I press the shutter. Words like therapy, healing, rejuvenation, quiet time, beauty, getting in touch with nature, getting away from the hustle of city life and pollination. Pollination? Yes, pollination.
Wikipedia defines biotic pollination as the process by which pollen is transferred in plants, thereby enabling fertilization and sexual reproduction. This process of pollination requires pollinators: organisms that carry or move the pollen grains from the anther to the receptive part of the carpel or pistil. Okay, so what does that mean to me?
The birth and growth of my photography is similar to biotic pollination. The pollinators are the scenes found in my viewfinder. When each one of those scenes touches me, I grow as a person, as a photographer. Each time I venture out a scene enticing me to press the shutter will present itself. So, I’m being fertilized by scenes around me.
