It was a damp and muddy Monday for a lunchtime ramble. I was going to go to the Botanics to try to track down a California bay laurel (the tree I miss most from California). I stopped on the Rocheid Path to take some pictures and chat to a chance-met colleague, and never made it to the Botanics.
Fallen leaf on mossy wall.
Taken 5 December 2005
Golden leaves and black stems.
Taken 5 December 2005
I don’t know what this wee plant is, but it’s cute.
Taken 5 December 2005
Surprise! We’re in the middle of a city!
Taken 5 December 2005
I know that not all of these pictures are worthy of Ansel Adams. My camera is extremely limited in what it can do, and even with a good camera I can’t always capture what it is that I find beautiful. I simply hope that the delight I felt in seeing these things comes through in the images.
I love these! The first two have almost a fish-eye-lens feel, and the others have such a short depth of field, they feel very close — I’m really amazed they’re from a camera phone. Good stuff, Abi. It’s almost like going on a walk with you. Minus the entertaining banter, of course.
The fish-eye lens feel, I think, is because of the way that the objects sit in the real world. The wall the leaf is on actually *does* curve away from the viewer at the left and right (the photo is 90-degree rotated because it looked better that way) and the next picture has the other leaves of the plant receding away.
All but the last picture in this set come from the phone’s “macro mode”, which gives good focus at about 15cm. The area that the camera uses to do the auto-focus is dead center of the screen, and takes maybe 1/25 of the total shot. The biggest challenge I face doing these is the wind, particularly for shots of things at the ends of branches.
The solution, of course, is that I take an average of four scrapped photos for every one that gets posted. That’s OK – there is zero marginal cost per picture taken.
You should ask my usual walking companions about banter…but I miss yours!