Ugly Up Close

I took some snaps of this thing this morning.

It's some sort of potpourri thing. I was interested in it because they look like little flowers, but are spiny and hard. They seem like the fossils of flowers or something.

Well, the point is the above shot is about what it looks like sitting on my table or in the viewfinder of the camera. Pleasant enough, good lines and nice way it scoops light to show the form.

Well, this is what it looks like close up at f42

The bone texture of the plant is more apparent, and so is every speck, mote and crack.

One of the things I like about photography is seeing what things will look like photographed. Sometimes it's fantastic, other times not as much. It's hard to know where to go when you get these kinds of results, because you didn't really have a goal in mind in when you started. You did it to see what would happen, and then were disappointed that what happened wasn't great on its own.

So then you get to the point where the experiment becomes more directed. Your results force you to recognize that you weren't really a dispassionate scientist, you had something in mind that was cooler, but you still don't really know what it was, so you just play around with different things. I like that the thing has a little beak in the center, I just want it to look less like paper pulp.

I need something more in the middle, something more like this.
There's still so much I don't understand at all. I need to get shooting more