We have one day of dog shows in the books. The good news is both dogs ended up taking a first place in one of their runs with Rizzi even earning another title. The bad news is they had more than one run a piece – translated, another 6 failures to round out the day. Speaking of failures, I’m actually sitting here in the midst of a rain of confetti thanks to a Butler choke and apparently OVER-RATED Zags – those two games drove me to tear up my NCAA bracket into tiny pieces and toss them in the air. Oh well, I can always Cub it and declare “Just wait until NEXT season”. Meanwhile I’ll work the sorrow off by cranking out another post.
Consider this part two of the Indy Botanical Gardens Statues post (link here). I was not kidding when mentioning there are a lot of interesting status there. Take for instance the Zombie Turtle
This little guy (or maybe gal) gave me an opportunity to assess the impact of composition on the overall impression of the shot. The shot above doesn’t look that bad. You can see the detail in the turtle’s underbelly and the outline is dark enough to pull it out of the background. The water didn’t come out as smooth as the shots in yesterday’s post – there wasn’t any fish in the ponds so guessing it was the wind effect again. Also note from the shadow you can tell the sun was high and in front – not my preferred shooting conditions (Linda also reminded me it was over 100 that day!).
Changing up the angle a bit gave me a better shot of the shadow, but at the cost of the main subject getting a little lost in the background.
The bizarre posture and the water ripple ended up mushing up (highly technical photograpy term) the reflection anyway. The turtle now looks less like a brains craver and more like an Olympic diver building up momentum to pop off the diving board before executing a Triple Lutz with an Inward Pike Somersault ending in a Fakey. If that makes sense to you then I’m not the only one who doesn’t know a damn thing about diving. The turtle sculptor must have been busy, because there were other poses sprinkled around the gardens. In another attempt to find a background that would complement the shot, I went with the water vegetation. If you recall, I tried a similar thing with the frog in the previous post. The results seem a tad distracting. My eye keeps getting drawn to the background. I call this the Kite Flying Russian Dancing Turtle.
And then there’s Michelangelo running through his forms.
A mere 20 degrees probably prevented that shot from being one of my favorites. Obviously not taking into consideration the full composition, I ended up cutting the angle short and instead of filling the background with uniform vegetation it looks like I got some concrete structure. Also makes it hard to shop in a picture of Shredder (hehehe). Lesson slowly getting hammered in – give the background more attention – 6 more times and it just might stick.
Hit the jump to read more about the Indy statues – but be warned, it does eventually descend into the gutter.
Life Intrigued 