Miscellany

Once Again, we go to the same places and come back with quite different pictures. Here's what I brought back from Kenilworth and the Arboretum, along with some thoughts about taking these pictures.

I shot an additional 2 pictures in addition to these - so that's 8 pictures in about 3 hours. I've heard on a couple of occasions that one should really only try to get one good shot per outing - after all, the "best" light is only available for a short while, so concentrate on getting that one good shot. I've tried, and it doesn't seem to work that way, at least for me. Too often, that one good shot turns out to be one bad image and then it all seems a waste. Taking many fewer shots rather than the scatter-gun, random approach I first started with does, however, make for a higher yield of better images.

This is the first picture I took at Kenilworth. I spent a lot of  time on it - walking around the pond, trying to get a study in contrasts, and taking maybe three  pictures from different angles, with greater and lesser coverage of the scene, varying points of focus, different depths of field and so on. Nothing really worked. This is an example - it's a pretty uninteresting picture to my mind but a lot of thought went into it! (I should mention that my dear wife was wandering around the screen whilst I was fixing the raw files in LR, and she quite likes it.)

Picture #2. Some kind of pond weed. I switched to a long telephoto lens at this point because what I was seeing and wanted to photograph was usually rather small and, I felt sure would show best after a crop that magnified a part of the image to show the detail.

On to Fern Garden. This fern image strikes me as rather amusing, almost as a gateway to some elfin hall.

The next two were also taken with the long telephoto. The first because the plant - whatever it is - drew attention by the symmetry of its leaves around the stalk, and I was sure I could highlight it by selective radial and gradient lightning and darkening in LR. I did try to change the angle so that the plants just behind the main one, which confuse the eye a little, could be separated from the main show; but clearing out this problem only brought into play some other anomaly, and since I didn't want to spend too much time on just this one image, I left it as it is.

The second image was taken for no particular reason. The long telephoto can achieve some wonderful background blur. This was shot from maybe 4-5 feet away, at F3.5 and a focal length of 105mm. I've taken many pictures like this in the past, and some turn out to be quite interesting.. This one, I think has no particular merit unless one is a botanist, and, of course, to remind what can be achieved with a fine lens.  (Aforementioned wife likes it.)

Finally, an example of what Barbara calls a "tree gesture", except in this case it is a log. It looks to me like some prehistoric creature, and a rather angry one at that.

To sum up - of these I stop to look twice at  2,3 and 4, and the prehistoric lizard above - I suppose, because it is unusual and contains that mysterious surprise factor.

Best All, Farid