Oh no, Not Another Photography BLog!
Well, after about a month of writing on Medium, I think I may finally have found my niche. No more banging my head against the wall, trying to knock loose something interesting to write about, thank God.
I’ve decided to write about my photography, since it is the one hobby I pursue enthusiastically, meaning I never leave the house without my camera.
But before I dive in, let me make it clear that I am not a professional photographer. I am what you could call an avid amateur, which means I do try to improve my skills as I go along, and I also like to experiment a lot. So, if you’re trying to learn how to take consistently great pictures, I’m probably not the best person to resort to, but if you want read entertaining tales about how I managed to get the shot, you’ve stopped on the right page.
My favorite subjects are just about everything under the sun, but I do tend to spend a lot of time hunting down bugs, sitting still for birds, and searching out unique plants and flowers, wild and domesticated animals (though I still have not gotten a shot of a fox; a small clan lives in the woods across the street from my house), and, yes, humans sometimes.
Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me tell you about the featured image.
If you said to yourself ‘that looks staged’ you’re correct, but I promise you it was not staged by me. It just happens to be a lucky accident of nature, but of course when I saw it, I thought I’d just discovered a rare new plant.
I was already writing my acceptance speech for when they named this new pretty after me, as I rushed over to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.
It turns out, I wasn’t hallucinating but for a brief moment there I had definitely taken a detour into the land of wishful thinking.
The pretty yellow and orange bloom is of course the Tulip tree flower (didn’t even know such a thing existed), and it turns out there’s one in the woods across the street.
Okay, so it looked like I was going to have to wait for another day to have a flowering plant named after me, but I still thought it was an interesting photo, and I was curious to see how many people on Facebook would mistake it for a new type of plant like I did. Nobody on Facebook did, but that didn’t stop me from pushing the image on my unsuspecting friends. I wanted at least one other person to say to me “Oh, man, that’s pretty, what kind of plant is it,” but they all saw through it right away.
Looks like I’m going to have to brush up on my botany, but as long as moments like that keep occurring, I will shoot and research later.
