Day 158: Pearlescent Pink

This is not bad for about 5 shots taken very quickly with my compact camera on the way past a flower bed.  They caught my eye because they were shining in this pretty pearlescent sort of way.  It wasn't particularly easy getting a good shot though because of where the sun was - if I tried a head on shot I cast my shadow over them - and because the compact camera has atrocious depth of field which makes side ways shots difficult.  You can see in the bottom left hand corner where it starts getting fuzzy and it got a lot worse.  One of the things I have discovered though, while doing this project, is that you can salvage a shot that hasn't turned out as well as you would have liked by cropping it and not being afraid to try rather different crops than you would normally consider.

To give you an idea of what I started off with this is the original that I took the crop from (click on it to make it bigger).  To get the photo above I have chopped off half the flower, and most of the background, where before I might have taken some of the background away to make the flower more of a focal point, but I would have said "Oh, that could have been good" and discarded it because I couldn't have the whole flower.  It's yet another way I am having to train myself to use my eyes more to look for something interesting, be it to get the original photo, or to get a crop that achieves the focal point you would have wanted originally through the camera.

Day 141: Catching The Last Of The Evening Sunlight

This blog is so fantastic and yet so frustrating all at the same time.  It is encouraging me to take a camera everywhere, and to learn more about my camera.  It's pushing me to shoot in manual a most of the time because then I can get what I want in the photo rather than relying on the camera to figure it out for me and then getting frustrated when it gets it wrong.  Because I have my camera nearly all the time I am getting shots of things I might not have otherwise.  It makes me look under my nose for photos too because you can't always be out and about seeing interesting things - life kinda prohibits that at times.  It's making me think about what I like about the photos I take because I have this space to write in and sometimes it's a surprise to me what I have to say.  And it is encouraging me to make decisions, something I am horrible at, which sometimes can delay a blog post by a couple of days, but ultimately something I am doing on a pretty much daily basis now.  But it really annoys me that some days I have several photos I want to post and other days absolutely nothing.  It annoys me that I have to post things I'm not happy with sometimes purely because I have nothing else.  It annoys me that the best photos are usually down to complete and utter luck.

Today was all grey and overcast.  I had actually expected it to rain solidly all day from what the weather forecast said.  I went out into the garden pretty reluctantly.  It really sucks to know you're unlikely to find something you're going to want to photograph because of the dull light.  I found a clematis flower in the greenhouse that I tried some interesting angles on, but back on the laptop they just don't quite cut it for me.  "If only it had been a bit brighter and sunnier"  I think, "Then they would have probably been good."  So I'm resigned to the fact that this is probably the best I can do and all that the day has to offer.  I go to Rainbows and get annoyed doing indoor photography which I kinda suck at.  And then, when I'm walking home, I come out of my thoughts and realise that the sun is so bright on it's way down in the sky that I can't see where I'm going.

As I walk in the gate I see the yellow poppies in the front garden beautifully lit and I stop to take a few shots, hoping they'll look as pretty in the picture as they do to my eyes.  Of course, with my history of wrestling with contrast on yellow flowers, they did not meet my standards and I'm ready to stomp into the house in defeat.  But then I notice another flower.  And then the one above.  And I just look at it and know that this is the one.  And if it's not and it doesn't work I am going to be so gutted.  I take a test shot and it looks even better than it does to my eyes, which is such a rare occurrence.

I am so pleased with this photo.  Late evening sunlight has a rather magical quality on certain subjects and it picks out this flower beautifully, showing off the shape, curve, texture, veining and stamen (which is also casting a lovely shadow).  What annoys me is that today was going to be a boring clematis flower photo, and I just happened to get lucky.  10 minutes either way and I'd have missed this entirely.  Sometimes photography is incredibly unfair.