When I was a kid my friends and I would spend entire recess periods in elementary school throwing these things, which we, and probably many others, affectionately termed helicopter seeds, up in the air and chase them down as they spun to the ground or even, if we were lucky, into our outstretched hands. It was super fun, especially on windy days, but something I just don’t see a lot of kids doing these days. Though that’s probably because where I live in Oklahoma we don’t really have many trees around that produce these kinds of seeds :) Every now and then you can find one though, like this one on the OSU campus near Theta Pond, and I was fortunate enough to come across this group of seeds on a cloudy, overcast day when the light was really good for this kind of picture. Almost too good, I might say, because the, uhm…wings? Rotors? Fins? I dunno what you call them, but the whirly-things on some of the seeds are just a bit too bright for my taste. Not a dealbreaker by any means, but maybe something that I could have at least mitigated by underexposing a bit and then bringing up the shadows in Lightroom. That’s pretty nitpicky though, and at the end of the day I’m really happy with how this turned out. So let’s just focus on that :)
I shot this at f/13 after trying various larger apertures because, you know, gotta get that sweet background blur, right? Well, not really, and this is a good example of why less (aperture) can be more (photo). The subject is separated from the background by such a great distance that I probably could have used a much smaller aperture and still gotten a good shot, with even more of the seeds in focus and the background would have still been a big green blur. No sweat. But, there was one consideration here that I don’t normally think about: ISO. I almost never think about ISO, since my full-frame Nikon D750, despite being over a decade old, produces great results even up to ISO 6400, but even so, at ISO 1800 I was starting to lose just a bit of the detail in the texture of the seed…extension thingeys. F/13 gave me a good combination of everything I care about in a shot like this, and I really like the foreground elements just barely intruding on the subject. It gives the viewer a sense that you’re peeking into a hidden world, uncovering some cool discovery that others might have missed entirely. At least, that’s what I hope you feel. Or maybe, if nothing else, you get the slight urge to pick up one of these seeds the next time you see it on the ground, toss it in the air, and marvel as it spins to the ground while you try to run and catch it.
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