Weed Shoot (No, not that kind)

Last night, once again, I found myself dreaming with a camera in my hand. For a few weeks now, I had been meaning to shoot these weeds, on the corner of a busy suburban intersection. I stop at this intersection everyday, sometimes more than once. The shape and outline of these ugly-beautiful structures against the sky, and their interesting details kept calling to me. In my dreams, I figured out where to park and how to navigate to the corner, and put my camera up to the sky.

Of course that meant that this morning I had to get up and go out. I woke to dark skies and cold drizzle. My only consolation was that my parking location had a 7-Eleven where I could run the heat in the car for a bit and get a diet coke.

I'm finding, more and more, that shooting in our current grey weather environment produces an interesting feel to the shots. While these shots are not exactly what I want them to be, they are damn close.

Shooting in Aperture Priority Mode, wide open. I did some very minimal post-processing to adjust the levels, and darken the highlights in a couple of them.


















The second to the last one, in the series above, is my fave. I had another close up, similar to the last one, that I really liked, but it just does not have quite the right focus. But the composition is just oh so sweet, IMO.



As a bonus, I got a shot of the evergreen, back in the parking lot, with some bokeh from the car head and tail lights at the intersection. I'm just a slut for bokeh. Heh.



Oh, and another storm drain for my budding collection.



Here are a couple showing my *location*. Don't you just love all the photography jargon I'm throwing around now that I have real equipment. : )






I was standing on that hillside, to the left of the fence, and was just imagining myself tripping (in my ridiculous choice of footwear for such an expedition -- crocs) and rolling down into the traffic. What a spectacular way to go out, right?