Wandering through the macro world
The overcast continues and it’s been over a week since I last saw sun. Either way, plan is to get out and shoot. Last night, while I was walking around the apartment, I saw small mushrooms buds growing around the trails. Thought this might be interesting and today I ventured out to look at the little world.
First stop, was those exact mushrooms. Now its in a pretty wide open park behind some benches, and I was feeling very uncomfortable being in public doing weird things. But I was hell bent on trying to get the shot. Since it was overcast, I carried a portable light with me just in case I needed it for compensating the dull light, or if I wanted any subject to standout. Here is the shot :)
The extra light I carried, worked out pretty well. Moving on the next was little sunflowers that were bundled up. First location I found was interesting but I couldn’t figure out any composition. I was literally on the ground trying to find a shot that’s not distracting from surrounding buildings and cars going by. I gave up here, there’s only so much weirdness I can put on display. Moving on, I found another bunch of those exact flowers and this was a little away from public space. So I decided to give it a shot.
Exactly at this moment, an old lady comes up to the park bench next to me and sits down. Now she is visibly confused to see what I am doing, I just let her know that I am just trying to take some pictures of pretty flowers. After a little bit of conversation about where I am from, she seemed comfortable now, and told me “As long as you don’t take pictures of my feet !”. Now mind you, I am facing the completely opposite direction of where she is, but it was funny :D I went back to my pretty flowers and that’s when I saw it. I was trying to fill the frame with flowers in horizontal frame, but when I stood up, I could see the flowers beautifully stacked up against the dark mulch. This is it, I got it.
The light I carried again came in handy to make one of them who grew way taller than others stand out.
The old lady was getting up to leave and I am glad she stopped by. Because of our conversation, I got out of my head and stopped trying to force what I was imagining. New perspective helped.
At this point, I am more than satisfied to wrap up and go home but I barely went far enough and I thought there are still probably some more little wonders that I usually ignore. I recently joined the “617 club” led by Thomas Heaton and Simon Baxter. Thomas is one of my idols when it comes to landscape photography, I learned a lot from watching him. In this club, we are currently running a challenge called “6x17 shot”. Its basically a panorama shot with that aspect ratio. I wanted to give this a shot with what I was exploring today, and that’s when I saw some wild tall grasses. Normally these are wild grown and they get chopped off, but they had these small yellow budding flowers on them. I thought this might be interesting, and took 6 panning shots to include its entire span. I am happy with what I got here.
I packed up from exploring the park area, and went into some nature trails to look for mushrooms. Unfortunately most of the mushrooms are destroyed, could be squirrels or rabbits. Somehow I found one, there was one very tiny mushroom by itself. This is where I literally got on the ground and tried to get a macro shot. I unfortunately don’t have macro lens, so I tried to get whatever I could. You can see how tiny it was compared to the grass around.
I think the day was pretty well spent at this point. I got to shoot small wonders and all the more reasons to avoid the perfect weather conditions and go shoot, you are bound to find something interesting. Before I wrap up, there was an interesting tree that was pretty dried up. I thought this would be an interesting abstract shot, so here it is.
With this, I conclude the macro photo exploration a success for today :)