Making the Best of…
I love shooting macro, but there’s one thing that will ruin my plans to go out and get my pants muddy and get some awesome close-ups: wind. Anything else – rain, snow, bright sun, no sun, dead flowers, no flowers – I can deal with. But wind kills it every time.
I realize that there are clamps and gadgets to hold the subject in place regardless of the weather, but I kind of have this stupid affinity for not disturbing the scene at all. Like, no touching, to moving a leaf or a blade of grass, etc. Oftentimes I break that rule but I try really hard to find some kind of angle where I don’t have to; I like to think that any rules I impose on myself to make a good photo just make me a better (albeit probably stupid) photographer.
So I’ve been sick for the latter half of the week, but I was determined to get out to take some photos today. The weather threatened rain, as it had all week, but today there was an added element: wind. And I’m not talking about a stiff breeze. The wind rattled our shutters, ripped leaves off trees…it was nearly Florida weather!
Of course I have to go out in this weather, so I made sure I had a DA* lens (the 200mm) along with my other favorite primes and headed out. The wind was pretty impressive where we live, at the bottom of the hills, but I wanted to get up to the crests, so I hiked nearly straight up the steepest street in our town into the hill country. I took a few snaps along the way, but I hadn’t felt I really captured the dreariness of the day; what I saw when I looked around was like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” before the tornado comes, but my pictures just looked like rather drab shots of random leaves and weeds.
So I hiked all….the….way…to…the…top. Basically, I was standing next to the “epic tree” I’ve posted a few times here. Up there was a field of barley and weeds that hadn’t been chopped down yet. It was like a massive battlefield. All these stalks were whipping around and clashing violently against each other, driven by this relentless wind, all under these heavy, dark, dread-inducing clouds.
I’m not entirely sure I captured the wind, but I think I finally found what I was looking for.
Shadows of the Wind #3, originally uploaded by aravis121.
