I set myself a little exercise this morning: to photograph the grass in our garden and nothing else. And to do so in a particular way that basically involved lying on it. My idea was to photograph from ground-level and to use a telephoto lens. The point was to narrow down what my eye was looking for and thereby give the technique its best chance to produce something interesting. I wanted to learn a bit more about what the angle/lens combination could do.
These are the results and I am happy with them. Being so low down gives depth to the images as there are always a range of grass stems out of focus, both infront of and behind whatever stem is in focus. It feels like you are in amongst the grass because that's where I was. It also allowed for some pleasant background light as I angled the camera towards patches of distant sky or in one example colourful tiles.
Today was a grey day with heavily overcast skies, which is reflected in the mood of these images as the colours are all quite subdued.
In a previous existence I knew some botany and would have wanted to list the grass species (I can still vividly remember surveying a meadow in Warwickshire, England, that had an amazing 24 grass species in it!). But now I'm in a different country (Thailand) with different (unknown) grasses and a different focus in what I do. So, today it's just grass.
Giving myself such a little experiment of blinkering my vision was a challenge to not get distracted by the all bird activity and buzzing bugs. I also had to ignore the more colourful flowers. But hopefully you'll agree it was well worth it in the end.
In a way it was also an exercise in letting go. When photographing, I am usually quite careful in trying to get the focus and framing just how I want it but today was windy and the dancing grass stems didn't really allow for any kind of precision. So I had to trust to a different kind of judgement mixed with a good chunk of luck. There is actually not much here that is well focussed but, for me, that works.
All photographs taken by me, this morning with a Sony RX10III camera.