Dune detail

Here’s a rather different kind of image for me.

On my little trip to the coast last week I first went to Druridge Bay and—after spending some time atop one of the dunes at the edge of the beach, taking stills and doing an initial flight with the drone—I spotted a single dandelion standing out against the tall grass as I turned to walk along the ridge line.

I had the 100-200mm lens on my Fuji GFX 50S, so stopped and took a quick frame pointing down at the dandelion, zoomed in as close as I could with the minimum focus distance at 200mm.

That first frame looked better on the back of the camera than I had expected, so I decided to work the scene a little more, ending up taking 8 portrait and 6 landscape frames, largely trying to make sure I got a sharp image as the little dandelion bobbed around in the breeze.

Reviewing the images in Lightroom back at home, it was quickly clear that the closer-in, portrait oriented shots were the stronger compositions and—as often seems to happen with opportunistic shots—it’s actually that very first frame I took on instinct that was the strongest.

As I worked through options in the field I had actually been getting further away from the strong point of interest that initially caught my eye, until I had overly-busy landscape orientations with too much in the frame.

If I had taken the wider view first, I may never have gone the other way and honed in on the central focus of the dandelion with a few strong grass leaves arching over, so it’s funny how that gut feel intuition that makes you need to take an image needs to just be listened to.

While I have a bit of a goal for the year of slowing my process down for the right compositions and really taking my time, I also regularly have the opposite problem of not listening to that gut feel when something catches the eye and stopping to find the photo in a scene.

I’m glad I did here, as I really rather like that first frame that caught my attention.