Dragons and Clouds - July 23, 2013

On the way home from work found myself driving through Bridgeland. There is a dog park on top of the hill there and I stoped to look for wild flowers. Instead I found that there were dragonflies about. This fellow sat on the twig and was reasonably still. I was using my 300mm lens with extension tubes on it. This was the first time that I'd tried the tubes out after picking them up more than a year ago. After a bit of wrangling with the equipment I was able to get a few macro shots of the dragonfly. In the original pic you can make out the lenses on the dragonfly's eyes which is pretty neat. I enjoy shooting macro shots like this not always for the end result but because I'm able to sit and focus (ha ha.. focus) on one thing for a while and forget everything else, like having a bit of tunnel vision. It's a nice escape from my mind - plus you get to stop, slowdown and look closely at something that you normally wouldn't see.

Then later in the evening it looked like there would be some interesting clouds and maybe a rainbow out east of the city so off I went.. reminds me of that aloof person that's always off chasing butterflies and rainbows. Hey, that's me! Anyway, as I was driving down the gravel road following the rainbow but it wasn't very strong and I couldn't find a composition to put it in on. There was this cool light coming from the west where the sun was making its way down to the horizon. I spotted this line of trees that were creating cool shadows on the ground in my rear view mirror so I stopped made a photograph of it.

Further down the road, I came across this farmers field where they had started harvesting. I liked the curves the hay makes on the ground and the interesting sky in the background. I tried to capture it using a couple of filters to block the light from the sky a bit so the camera could also capture the darker-in-shadow foreground.

I left here and while driving back stopped to photograph big storm clouds in the sky. As of yet, I've not posted any of those photos, but if I do, they'll show up here.

Thanks for looking,
Brad.