Slowing Down

As I've written recently, one of things the drew me to photography was photographing flowers.  At first I photographed a lot of flowers, then slowly got away from that as I started to explore landscape photography, travel more, and in general spent more time covering as much ground as possible in places I hadn't been before.  I got some good photographs out of these efforts, but I probably missed just as many, if not more, by not slowing down a bit and trying to look around, trying to see the beauty that exists in what at first appears to be the mundane.

In the last year as I've explored New Mexico, I've started to slow down a little, to try and appreciate the smaller things.  Doors, windows, old motel signs, ristras, wagon wheels, I've photographed them all, repeatedly, sought them out, sought to appreciate the smaller parts of a larger whole.  I've set "assignments" for myself, things I want to photograph, techniques I've wanted to explore, confined myself to only bringing one lens along on a day trip, all in a way to keep pushing myself forward.

As I wrote recently, I hadn't used my macro lens in a quite a while, but that morning spent with my macro lens, just poking around my own backyard, was another example of what could be found when I took the time to slow down...

Recently northern New Mexico has seen some consistent rain, a welcome relief from the heat and four years of exceptional drought.  Wildflowers have been in full bloom, and my wife and I decided to go for a drive down some isolated country roads to look for wild sunflowers, which I remember seeing last year. I didn't bring my macro lens along as I wanted a little flexibility in terms of reach and the ability to go wide if a monsoon suddenly rolled in with some drama in the skies.

At first it looked like we had missed the peak of the sunflower bloom, as we saw more dead headed plants than live ones, but soon we came upon a nice stretch of them.  The morning light had faded, and the breeze had kicked up a little bit, so at first I didn't think I'd be able to get any shots in.  The sunflowers that were facing me were already washed out from the bright light, and getting too close to them, with the breeze blowing, made it difficult to get a sharp photo.

After a few shots I decided to concentrate on the flowers that were turned towards the sun, and shoot those from the back so I could catch the sunlight glowing through the petals.  I also took a few steps back, chose the widest aperture possible, and racked my lens all the way out to compress and blur the background as much as possible.  This first shot had some nice light hitting the petals of the flower, but I was totally dissatisfied with the background.

Walking down the road a bit I saw a taller flower that was pointing directly up, so I crouched down just a little bit to try and get a "level" shot of it against the blue sky.

Then it was just a matter of trying to grab a few shots...

Varying the angle to emphasize a little less (above) or a little more (below) of the sky...

Are these great shots?  No.  Will they go in my portfolio?  No.  But they gave me a chance to look a little differently at things again, try different techniques, and push myself a little farther down the road...

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 16-85 DX VR

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