Let me ask you, with the scene above, What do you see? Do you see a photo opportunity laid out before you? I would venture to guess that many of you just might pass by this spot thinking that there wasn’t anything special about the place.

For me though, the textures, patterns and colors is what caught my eye. All sorts of little things tucked inside the weeds that was begging to be discovered. Luckily I had a camera bag in the back of the car with three lenses that covers me for almost anything. A 100mm Macro lens, a 24-105mm, and the 100-400mm lens.

Pulling out the Macro Lens and after a while my tripod, I began to slowly look at the details within the chaos. There were seed heads

And rain drops clinging on for dear life.

I most certainly wouldn’t have discovered this Praying Mantis Egg Sack if I hadn’t slowed down and took my time to slowly walk the weed patch.

There was just a slight breeze and I was struggling a little getting focus. The Canon 5D Mark IV has a great live-view feature that allows you to touch the LCD screen to acquire focus on a specific spot and to trigger the shutter button. It helped a bit, but even then I found manually focusing helped a little more.

Before I knew it, I began to intentionally throw things out of focus to create more of an abstract look to the images.

Even more so, I then realized that if I really did throw everything out of focus I could come home with a selection of textures for layering in Post Processing.

I was starting to have just way too much fun and before I knew it an hour had flown by without even realizing it. And so I left the forest’s weedy edge with its magical and fun playground.

Sometimes you have to just think out of the box and the possibilities will appear to you.