the chicken or the egg?

This is just a picture I took a couple of days ago at the park here in town. Sorry for the cheesy "soft water" look of the picture. It was dusk so there wasn't much light and I had to use a tripod and a slow shutter speed.

I took this one at about the same time as the last one. I took it earlier in the evening though when there was enough light that I didn't have to use my tripod. I had to repeat my Streamwalker technique to get this shot.

I am, at heart, a lazy person. Which works well with my photographic style (or maybe my photographic style is a result of my being lazy. This seems like it is one of those “which came first? The chicken or the egg?” things that pretty much can't be answered and, frankly, it seems to me that spending much effort trying to answer it is silly). Seeing interesting things is often an issue of just plain slowing down so you can see them. It has been said (and it seems kind of obvious) that you'll experience more if you walk down a road than drive down the same road in an air-conditioned car doing 60. And you can't get much slower than not moving...which is often just what I do when I'm out taking pictures. I get out and walk (slowly) around and then stop and sit. It's not as if I'm tired...I'm just lazy. But it's surprising how often it happens, when I'm sitting, that I see something I wouldn't have seen if I had just walked by. And it's also surprising how often the picture I take of that-thing-I-wouldn't-have-seen-if-I-hadn't-been-sitting turns out to be decent. The picture of the blue ice is an example of that. I had been out wandering around in a state park that is right along the Mississippi River and decided to just sit down and hang out for a while. It was a sunny day (the water is blue from it reflecting the sky) and it was pleasant to just sit there in the sun. These chunks of ice floated by slow enough that I got several pictures of them and this one was the best. So the moral of the story is to SLOW DOWN.

My lazy ice picture

I went out in the evening a couple of days ago and took a walk around the park near my house. [A digression: vanilla works awesome for keeping gnats away from you...and it doesn't smell like hell.] I got a few decent pictures. It's amazing to me how many of my pictures turn out to be of leaves.

In winter it may be frost on leaves, or some derivative of ice.

In spring baby leaves are a fun thing to photograph.

In summer the leaves are fully developed but can be backed up by

grass, sky, other leaves or whatever.

In fall leaves can be worthy of a picture all by themselves.