.Mythmaker

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This shot is a perfect example of that "tunnel vision" that afflicts us mad photographers when we get in the field and find a primo scene and get it in our thick heads only ONE way to photograph it. So we mess around with the myriad settings at our disposal. We take advantage of the massive memory of our cards and shoot hundreds of shots of the one scene. But despite this we only SEE the scene one way, we get stuck in our groove, we don't find a way to stop and look anew. I was photographing this billabong because I love water and the way it reflects light but I totally failed to see how this one little flat rock could turn a simple reflection into something wonderful. My failure meant that in the field I never took one single shot that paid attention to that bit of rock and the way it interacts with all the other elements in the shot. Later on, at home, I see the potential and so I came up with this image, but it's a compromise, the bit of flat rock was not sharp, not in my dof, I had to do a lot of messing around to get the flat rock reasonable enough to position it at the lower right third "power point". If great photography is about anything it's about SEEING. I love my photography hobby but I have SO much to learn sometimes I simply feel like a bull in a china shop. (Any Mythbusters fans will know how inaccurate that analogy is!) So here's the shot that I wasn't trying to get but which was there for me to get, so much better than I did, if I'd seen it in the field, at the moment, right then, wonderful Pentax K20D in hand.

Enjoy.

Mikel.