SEEING AND MAKING IMAGES IN YOUR BACKYARD

I have read comments on my blog and others that readers wish they lived in an area with interesting things to photograph; that it must be wonderful to live near animals and landscapes so beautiful.  It is but if you do not, than that is not a reason to stop photographing. I wanted to post a blog to show that you can make interesting images in your own neighborhood; even in your own backyard, if you take the time to look and see. 

So when I awoke this morning I grabbed my camera and 105 Nikon macro lens and went out to my backyard in search of interesting and hopefully beautiful images. I have a small garden out there and thought what better place to look. At 9 AM it was just leaving the golden hours, as I wrote in yesterday's post. 

http://jpweddingphotograpy.blogspot.com/2011/05/importance-of-quality-of-light.html

The first thing I saw was a shrub I just planted last week. It has red flowers. Red always catches my eye and I would suspect most photographers who shoot in color. This is what I saw when I looked at it.

I think it's an interesting plant with great potential for adding color to my garden. What about as a subject to create interesting images? As you can see in this image, it's not so interesting.  The light was a little harsh and I have not finished planting in the garden so  the background was not great. So do I move on, or worse yet go back in the house to have breakfast? Say the heck with it because there's nothing out there to photograph? No, I tried to "see" an image. If this view didn't work, than including more of the background would be worse, in my opinion. Maybe you would "see" something that I didn't.

What about getting in closer and carving out mini landscapes of this flower? This would turn from a documented image to a creative image; things I saw and helped create with my choice of ISO, f stop and a little post production. Let me say right now that in post production the color channels were not manipulated and vibrancy and saturation were not adjusted in either Lightroom or Photoshop. These are my two most used post production tools and the only ones I used on these images. The only work performed in Photoshop was reducing noise and sharpening. In LR I adjust white balance, exposure slightly, added a vignette in some images and cropped almost all of them in some fashion. These were the images I captured. I hope you find them interesting and enjoyable to view.

Remember these are what I saw my own personal vision. If you were out there with me looking over my shoulder, you might have wondered what the heck I was shooting. Learning to "see"  is the important skill to learn.