March 13: Overgrown

I'm back! Well, at least for today. I'm feeling pretty good today, but I'm not quite out of the 1st trimester yuckiness. I'm in my 14th week, so any day now I'll get over it. Today is a beautiful day here, so I spent some time outside.

One of the blogs I read raised the question of whether or not you can take a good picture of chaos. I was thinking of that as I looked at my very overgrown garden. We've had rain at least once a week for something like the past month or so, which is pretty unusual for us. So I haven't even had to water my garden in quite a while. And since I've been feeling crappy, I haven't done any cleanup of the garden. The lettuce and brocolli has grown past the eating stage and is flowering. It's pretty neat to see what happens to them after they fruit.

Anyway, I think the answer to the question is that the only way to get a good chaos picture is to have one area of focus. Which, by definition, is a bit hard with chaos. So I didn't get a good picture that truly shows the chaos of my garden right now, but I was happy with the pics I did get.

From Runners Up

185mm, 1/250s, f/4.0, aperture priority, no post-processing

• I like the mix of shadow and sun light leaves in this, it adds some interest to a some-what boring plant.
• It took me a while, but I am finally remembering that if I have trouble focusing with my 70-200mm lens that I need to change the switch on my lens that adjusts the focusing for close distance versus long distance (<>3m).
• And since I'm so delinquent, here's some other photos from today's shoot. Here is what so much rain produces: Lots and lots of WEEDS!

From Runners Up

185mm, f/4.0, 1/250s, aperture priority, no post-processing

• Those are weeds. All of them. We are going to use a lot of vinegar on our yard this year.
• I liked the effect of the old pot and new growth.
• I tried using manual mode on this, but with the bright sun I couldn't see the readings in the view finder. I could use the screen on top of the camera, but I was having trouble aiming at the same time. Anybody have a trick they use??

From Runners Up

144mm, f/4.0, 1/1250s, aperture priority, cropped

• This obviously isn't in my garden, but the rose did come from a plant of mine. (Which, funny, enough, soon after I took this picture, Keith came home with a dozen roses! Isn't he sweet?) I put this on top of our grill (with a black cover) so that I could get the blue pool in the background. I love how that turned out!
• Since the rose is white a lot of my pictures did not have enough contrast between the petals. Which is why I chose this one and cropped it.
• I was hoping to add a vignette to this to try it out, but apparently Picasa doesn't have that feature. Boooooooo.