Random Thoughts

Remember to Look Down /  by Todd Henson

Eastern Box Turtle in the grass.

In a previous post I talked about keeping your eyes open while hiking, about staying aware of your surroundings. It’s easy to overlook opportunities if you’re too focused on looking straight ahead.

This post follows a similar theme. I encourage you to look down once in a while while you’re hiking. Often there won’t be anything down there that catches your eye, but if you don’t get into the habit of looking down you may miss golden opportunities.

If we hadn’t looked down we wouldn’t have seen this Eastern Box Turtle making its way across the trail. It was almost across the trail when we found it. But it saw us and froze, as turtles often due, retracting into its shell. We kept a little distance and stayed still, allowing the box turtle to become a little more comfortable with us, at least enough to pop its head back out far enough for a couple portraits.

Closeup of Eastern Box Turtle in the grass.

After making a few photos we went on our way and allowed the box turtle to continue its trip across the path. I didn’t want to draw too much attention to it and risk it getting injured. Box turtles are thought to be on the decline due to things like habitat loss, death on roadways, and people taking them home as pets, so we need to do what we can to help them survive.

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Keep Your Eyes Open /  by Todd Henson

Male White-tailed Deer at the edge of the woods watching and listening.

Sometimes as photographers we get so focused on one thing while out in the field that we may miss opportunities. I don’t think focus is bad, especially if you’re working on something very specific. But it can blind us if we become too focused too often.

As an example, I was hiking with my father in a nearby wildlife preserve, a small stretch of land along a river and not far from the city. Birds are one of the most common forms of wildlife I usually find so that’s what I was looking for, my eyes focused up into the trees.

Thankfully my father looked along the edge of the tree-line and saw this lone male white-tailed deer lit up against the dark foliage in the background. The deer saw us but didn’t seem overly concerned. It was curious, raising its ears to listen while watching us. When we didn’t do anything funny it went back to eating the greenery right in front of it before moving back into the trees.

This was a fortunate find. If I hadn’t been hiking with my father I likely would have missed the deer because I was spending so much time looking up into the trees. I need to remind myself to stay alert, to look around every so often, paying attention to my surroundings. You never know what you may find.

And it is sometimes helpful to have a second pair of eyes along with you. 😃

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Don't Overlook the Obvious - Dandelion Puffball /  by Todd Henson

Soft white dandelion puffball with shallow depth of field

Sometimes we get so obsessed looking for particular types of subjects or scenes for our photographs that we completely stop looking for anything different. When this happens we can end up in a rut, creating the same photos over and over again. How do you get yourself out of a rut, or keep yourself from falling into one? One answer is: don’t overlook the obvious!

What are those subjects or scenes that you walk by every day, never really paying any attention to? One for me is the dandelion, that plant we often overlook as a weed in our yards, a nuisance that spreads so quickly. But when I take the time to get down on my hands and knees, observing and photographing the dandelion, I realize just how great a subject it can be.

I created the images in this post along a trail in a national park. Now, you don’t need to go all the way to a national park to photograph something this obvious, but that’s where I happened to be when I noticed it. I had been photographing wildflowers when I came upon a dandelion puffball, just waiting for a gust of wind to release all those little seeds. And I thought, that little puffball is actually really beautiful. So I lay down and started observing the puffball through my macro lens.

One thing I noticed right away was the variety of images I could create just by adjusting the focal point. When I focused on the front of the puffball I created the image at the top of this post, a nice soft puffball with only a small number of lines in focus right at the front. All the rest is a soft out of focus blur with a beautiful green background.

But what if I focused on the inside of the puffball? How many of us pay attention to what the inside of a dandelion puffball looks like before the wind breaks it up? I rarely have. But this day I decided to do just that. And below is the photograph I created.

Soft dandelion puffball showing center in focus

This photo is much like the first, and in fact when viewed small enough or far enough away they both look the same. Both images have a shallow depth of field, but when you look at a larger version of both photographs they are very different. In this photo we see much more detail in the center of the dandelion, how each of the seeds are attached to the center stem, with the straight lines extending out to all the puffy parts around the outside of the puffball. I like this image, with the center and outer ring in focus, and a nice soft middle layer.

The point of all this is to experiment. Try different things. Find a normal everyday subject or scene, something you usually overlook, and try to make a pleasing image of it. Then try to make another, changing your perspective, changing your focus, changing the depth of field. Be creative, see if you can discover anything new about your subject, something you hadn’t noticed before. And then share what you’ve found. Maybe it will prompt someone else to go out and see the world in a different way. And maybe it will help you out of a rut.

There’s a lot of beauty out there, we just need to open our eyes to see it.

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