Local Weed

Continuing on from the last post…it’s always a good idea to look around for things of interest while you’re out shooting your intended subject.

That evening I went out to shoot the hay bales started out as an exercise in futility. Sort of like shooting parades for me. More often than not I end up deleting all kinds of pictures and the ones that remain rarely get a rating higher than 3 stars. I have come to accept it yet still being the eternal optimist, I continue to try. I was going to get a decent walk in no matter what happened.

As I was packing my pack up I made sure my 50mm Sigma macro lens was included. Just in case. You never know. Well, hay bales being hay bales, there wasn’t much going on and, valiantly trying different angles and heights with little to no success, I moved on. Right about that time I spied some yellow flowers and thought, “what the heck, I’ll do some macros”. Good decision. I switched lenses and started on my trek to find an interesting subject. I shot a few of the flowers and things were looking good. I was having a bit of a problem with movement though. A gentle breeze, the macro photographers arch enemy, raised its annoying head but I kept at it trying to time things out. Then I saw the dead plants! They didn’t seem to be moving as much in the breeze. I made a few pictures of them and was pretty happy. I also made a few pictures of the sunset with my Fuji X Pro1 because hey, why not? It wasn’t like I had any plans for the rest of the night!

When I got home and uploaded the pictures I was more focused (heh heh…focused. Get it?) on the Racoon pictures because that was clearly the highlight of the walk and really didn’t pay attention to the other pictures until later. That was when I noticed how cool the dead weeds looked. I messed around in Lightroom with them for a bit and then out of curiosity, hit the V key to see how it looked in b&w. Bingo!

I edited this picture in Google Nik Silver Efex because that seems to be the way I roll when it comes to b&w pictures. Lots of control with all of those plugins and I’m usually pretty darn happy with the results. When I edit b&w pictures I usually stick to straight b&w but this time I tried a little sepia toning and was happy with it. Always a good idea to use that V key and see how things look.

Below are a couple of other pictures from that walk.