As I worked on my 90 day photo project – I quickly realized that I was going to be photographing in all sorts of weather conditions – including ones that I usually avoid shooting in for my flower photography. I like to photograph flowers on nice calm days. It’s easier for me to capture the details and beauty of the flower if it’s not moving. In Bethesda in the winter – we get lots of wind. At first I tried photographing the calm between the gusts of wind – but that really didn’t work and I wasn’t happy with my photos. So instead – I tried to capture the feeling of the wind in my photos. Here are some of my wind photos from my 90 day photo project.
© 2011 Patty Hankins
Day 5
Dancing in the Wind
It was pretty windy when I headed out to photograph this morning. So rather than trying to capture a moment when the leaves were still – I decided to try to photograph the movement of the leaves in the wind. I wanted to capture enough movement that the leaves were blurred – but not so much that you can’t tell it’s a photo of leaves. This was my favorite of the photos I took this morning.
© 2011 Patty Hankins
Day 17
Berries in the Wind
I realized I”m behind again on posting photos from my 90 day photo project. I’ve managed to get out shooting every day – just haven’t gotten any editing/posting done
Day 17 was another gray windy day. I found a tree with lots of red berries and almost no leaves – and just played with my exposure to see what I could come up with that showed the movement of the berries in the wind. This was my favorite (f8 at .6 sec, ISO 100) – long enough that there was movement – short enough that you can tell what I was photographing. Some of the longer exposures ended up almost a total blur – and the shorter ones weren’t very interesting to me
© 2012 Patty Hankins
Day 57
Evergreen in the wind
Another really windy day – so once again I tried to capture the wind in my photo. I photographed one of the evergreen trees across the street. I chose this tree because it had two different shades of green in needles – which I thought would look neat if I capture them moving.
I played alot with aperture and shutter speed to get the look I wanted. Final settings were ISO 100, f 20, 1 sec exposure. I like the contrast of the non moving tree trunks and the shades of green in the motion. I edited it in Lightroom – if I were to do a more serious editing – I’d probably take it into Photoshop and desaturate the dark green ivy leaves on the tree trunk – so that the only greens in the photo are the needles in motion.
© 2012 Patty Hankins
Holly in the wind
I headed out hoping to photograph some red berries against the green leaves of the holly tree. Unfortunately there weren’t many berries left – seems the birds have been enjoying them!
And then the wind began to blow – and I noticed that the different shades of green and yellow in the leaves created streaks of color as the branch and leaves blew. I like the little patch of yellow leaves on the left side of the photo – and they bright streak of color they add to the image.
This was a definate case of hoping to find one thing to photograph – being a bit disappointed – waiting and watching – and finding something unexpected and wonderful to photograph!
© 2012 Patty HankinsJust Hanging On
One of the oak trees in the neighborhood still has some of its leaves. When I started photographing them, I was seeing the clusters of brown leaves against the tree. And then I spotted these two leaves at the end of a branch – seeming to barely hanging on to the tree as they danced in the wind
© 2012 Patty HankinsAnother windy day!
On Friday we were having wind gusts up to 30 mph. So I decided it was going to be one of those days when I try to capture the feeling of the wind blowing in a photo.
I liked the way this particular evergreen behaved in the wind – the underside of the needles looked to be a lighter shade of green than the top of the needles – so when the wind blew the branches up – I got a great two toned look to the moving branches.
Great project idea, Patty! Work with what you’ve got, right?
I especially love that first shot—what gorgeous colors. Again, great idea!