What's Down There?

Weeding the flowerbeds shows up just how many snails there are hiding in the deep dark depths of the foliage.  I haven't spent a great deal of time watching them before but I did this evening and it is quite amazing how fast they can move and how they get from leaf to leaf and onto flowers.  I would not have expected that flower to hold the weight of the snail either.  I did move it on, but while I was watching it it had the decency not to eat the flowers.  It seemed to be searching for something lower to the ground... are snails afraid of heights?

Day 277: Pink Gladioli

Today was spent mostly packing and travelling so I didn't have any much time for photography, and when we arrived it was dark.  Luckily my aunt has some lovely pink gladioli in a vase and they did nicely for something to photograph!  It doesn't quite have as much contrast as I would like but I still think it's pretty.

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.