Conspicuous Wind

Initially, when I purchased my first Neutral Density filter, my obsession was water. I took it to every river and lake that I could think of and exhausted my creative drive pretty quickly. After playing with countless images of smooth water and near-perfect reflections, I wanted to test my rules a little. 

My previous goal was tack-sharp images with crisp lines and frozen action but that gets boring after a while. I was beginning to feel comfortable with my understanding of the exposure triangle and I was happy with my images but I felt like they were missing something. They were exactly what all of my teachers told me to strive for which is nice but also a little lackluster. I can't remember exactly how the saying goes but there's something I saw somewhere about artists being the ones that learn the rules so that they can creatively break them and I felt like this was where I sat. 

On a decently temperate but windy January day, I set off to August A Busch Conservation Area to experiment with my filter in a way that I had not yet attempted. I drove through the property seeking the perfect location to photograph the wind but initially had very little luck. With all of the trees having lost their leaves already, I was focused on finding tall grass that I could observe and hopefully accomplish what I was reaching for. 

On my way out of the conservation area, however, the tree in the image caught my eye. It was alone in a vast field of dormant grass and its branches danced happily in the wind.

I pulled over to the side of the road and, as luck would have it, there was no trail leading to this field. With my camera and tripod in hand, I pushed through the brush and decomposing leaves that had fallen at the end of the previous year and finally made it to the field. The wind was strong and after trying many different angles and exposures, I found one that I liked and committed to getting my shot. I ended up having to hold the tripod down at the base with my foot and using a timed shutter release on my camera because the wind was causing a great amount of camera shake and ruining my images. 

Eventually, after a few failed attempts at freezing all of the still objects in the frame, I was able to capture this image. Due to the strength of the wind, I was certain that I was leaving the field without any usable images from the day but when I got them onto my computer and was able to zoom in on the details, I was happily surprised that this one survived and even more happy with the fact that I successfully photographed the wind, despite its efforts in preventing me from doing so.