Only one week earlier, I had failed to capture an image that I was pleased with at Green Lakes, so I was determined to do better this time.
When I arrived to the lake there was a thick layer of mist/fog that wasn’t going to give the the opportunity to capture geese in flight as I had wanted last week, but I thought I knew where and how they might be flying, so set myself up at the edge of the lake in hopes that the geese might fly through the scene.
I was hoping to use a landscape orientation, but the birds ascent was too fast and I was forced to use a portrait orientation successfully captured what the scene presented to me, but the birds are ultimately smaller and more abundant than I envisioned and the image falls a bit short as a result.
When the birds were finally low enough in the frame to afford me a landscape composition, there was too much space between the birds in the mid-ground and the rocks/grasses in the foreground. I could have moved to the left, but then the man-made footbridge on the western shore would have been brought into view and I thought it would detract from the image to a greater extent than the poor composition, so I captured an image to archive the morning only. Perhaps I coulda-shoulda zoomed in on the birds, but I was married to the idea of keeping everything setup with a wider field of view in case some birds decided to fly through my scene just as I imagined they might.
Of course, the best laid plans are put to waste when a photographer is forced to share the scene with a small dog who comes to the same spot on the same lake every morning to look for and play with the fish.
As the sun climbed, the fog burned off and I ventured off to the rolling hills to see what I could find. The birds were sparse, but there was some milkweed seedlings that were beginning to open up. I took an abundance of images of a variety of plants, most of them backlit. This was one of my favorites, but I confess that I became bored and uninspired both on location and at my laptop when capturing and culling the images.
I would capture one other image that interested me before walking back to the car to return home, this time using employing the IR camera.
I sorta fancy the conceptual contrast between the natural and the man-made, the wood vs the steel, but even so, the image doesn’t say anything and it doesn’t really have much to offer.
Hopefully my photo trips in the weeks ahead will deliver on my potential to create some images that are worthy of hanging on my wall. Only time will tell, of course.