Photographer's Dance

Look up, look down,
turn left, turn around,
pivot right, and day or night,
look for quality of light.
Move in tight,
now back away.
Get it right,
for, night or day,
this may be your only chance.
So do the photo maker’s dance!

- Jess Isaiah Levin

Okay, low grade doggerel, but I take the ideas seriously. On November 19 I noticed that a neighbor's rose bush was blooming, in spite of temperatures just above freezing overnight. My first step was to try to place myself for a good angle to view the highest rose. A cluster of bare branches behind it blurred into a nice simulation of motion, whereas a fairly high shutter speed froze the swaying flower into apparent stasis.

A few steps forward and to one side yielded a simpler background and let me frame the bloom in the crook of a small tree.

Notice how similar the viewpoint of the next shot is to the preceding. I shifted just far enough to allow a  shaft of sunlight to burst into "bloom" for a glamorous backdrop.

Leaving the flowers, I found a leaf that had curled so much it resembled a jester's hat. (Lately I'm noticing a tendency to want my nature photographs to look like something that they are not. Well, not just lately - there's been some of that direction in my work for a long time.) Maybe a jester's hat in an aquarium?

 

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