Once upon a walk

Thoreau said, "Many men fish all their lives without realizing it is not fish they are after." The same thing can be said for photography, mushrooming, painting, etc. I picked up my camera bag this morning and called the dogs and headed out to capture the perfect picture or find the perfect mushroom, or get an idea for a great painting. And what I actually achieved was a state of Zen even if it did not match Magique's.

I so envy that look of pure spiritual transformation she gets when only on of four paws is on the ground. But I was rather happy with my Nikon D90 on the sport setting. I may still get blurred wings on hummingbirds but no more blurred dogs!

I think she spies some movement in the grass but it is almost as if she admires the view every bit as much as I do. I got pictures of this panorama without her in the foreground but she lends a scale and perspective missing without her there. Which reminds me that some of the things I crop out of a picture should stay because of composition. In the first picture I cropped out the blurred overhead branches only to go back to the uncropped version.

I have another picture of this same sun drenched glen without the pine and stump on the right. But it is that tree that sets off the aspens in the distance.

Another use for the sports icon on my digital camera is ripples on water. But I missed the muskrat that caused the ripples.

I am also using that sports icon for flowers. I tried it on a windy day to avoid blur and was thrilled that while it blurred the background it had greater depth of field where the flowers were concerned meaning I had a better chance of all petals or multiple flowers being in focus.

Don't you love the petal of the upper left flower draped over its neighbor? One of the things about looking through a camera or just taking a walk with a camera is that you become aware of details you would otherwise miss.

Details like the shadows of the hollyhocks on the wall. Or the intricate fold and subtle colors at the heart of a flower.

In the movie about Van Meer - Girl with a Pearl Earring, there is a scene where he asks his maid what color the clouds are and she first answers white. So what color is a white hollyhock? Or a black dog with the sun behind her?