Good Evening:

Renee's "flowers" quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay reminded me that a week or so ago I had taken a number of pictures of flower-beds at Wheaton Recreation Park, which has a great staff of wonderful gardeners, in an attempt to figure out what makes for interesting shots of flowers. (Apropos of the quote, though ,I would not have guessed it was from Ms.Edna; if ever there was a riotous and chaotic life here surely was one - the last person who would care about picking a flower and having her way with it.)

Anyway here are some shots. While I imagine they might grace a page or two of a gardener's catalogue, they are not really all that terribly interesting. Run of the mill, really. Does anyone have any ideas on what might make for the kind of view that would make someone stop and take another look?

I include a couple of serious crops - to show the detail available. These are each -at a rough guess - about 5-10 percent of the total picture. They are shot with a Canon 17-40mm L lens on a fine camera. In fact I think the crops are a lot more interesting than the whole picture. But insofar as this is a landscape class the challenge is to get a wide or deep picture in which the flower beds feature as an element. Perhaps that's the problem here - the framing needs serious thinking.

Farid

Catch up

With some welcome prodding by Jay for critical feedback, I've gone back through the blog to offer some opinionated comments with the hope of being helpful. I hope you don't agree with everything and have responses to some of the comments offered by all.

Assignment: Come to location with a specific articulation of technical, visual design or expressive challenge for the day and I will attempt to work with you. We'll see what develops in terms of what can be shared within our group - on location and in blog and class critique.

"flowers" Friday April 16, 2010

"I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one."
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

Weekend Pictures from Great Falls, VA

Timing

Spent a Sunday morning out in Great Falls, and include below some pictures along with my own critiques. These two pictures have less to do with critique than with my own continuing astonishment at what a difference a few minutes takes - they were shot 7 minutes apart with a telephoto (185 and 200 mm) from Overlook 3. Two painters who were on the platform told me I should have got there earlier for the spume and spray were far more salient. Anyway, picture 1 is not deliberately blurred, it just shows off the mist thrown up by the falls; in picture 2 the mist has been somewhat burned off; a few minutes later and it was a lot less evocative.

Going Walkabout

On a well beaten path off trail in Great Falls, Va., I came across this small tarn. A steep and rocky climb down to the edge of the pool and then up again to a rocky ledge providing an overlook. For once remembering what I am supposed to be practising this week, I tried out different perspectives and attempted to achieve sharpness front to back. Here are four views. The first, from the edge of the pool seems to me now pretty blah. At the time the rock face was quite interesting containing ledges with some white and pink flowers. But all the detail gets lost. Picture 2 is pretty awful - everything intervenes in one's view of the pool. Picture 3 is better, I think, but it is awfully clutttered - what is the viewer supposed to be looking at? The photographer can't seem to make up his mind as to whether it is the foreground or the background that is of interest. Finally picture 4 achieves a simple uncluttered view of the pool and, guess what, it is pretty blah too. There was an interesting picture here, I think, just failed to get it.