Day Eighteen: We're not in Kansas...never were.

Today was a long day at work and all day I couldn't figure out what I was going to shoot for today's shot.  I had nothing.  Usually I go for a couple of short walks during the day with the point-n-shoot at least just getting some suff that I could use in a pinch.  But today, didn't even manage to do that.  I had about 45 minutes when I left work and decided I'd shoot Molly's Wizard of Oz figurines.  They've been living in a pocket of my camera bag for the last two weeks, and I've posed them in various places for my idea file I've been keeping to draw back on when things get to feeling stale. 

I remembered seeing yellow bricks at a location I was shooting at last week.  The picture of the castle at the bottom of this post is also from that location.  It was one of last weeks runner-ups.  I brought a flash and reflectors with me, but the light was nicely broken up and interesting looking filtering through trees, some high grass, and the castle and I was able to position Dorothy and the Witch to take advantage of the natural light.  I under exposed to give an ominous feel and pumped the saturation up a good bit (the yellow bricks are kind of pale and faded) to get rich warm tones.

One of the concepts I really want to learn to develop is having a good sense of visual weight for the subjects in my photos.  After years of practicing classic rule-of-thirds composition, producing relatively boring photos that weren't snapshots...but weren't much better, I started reading some ebooks by David duChemin, (http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog/) Drawing the Eye, in particular,  and learning to think not in terms of thirds of the frame but rather about the visual weight given to the subject matter.   In the past, I've tried to shoot stuff like this and have always been disappointed.  But it occurred to me today that all I needed to do was to apply the same principles to make a shot like this work. 

Here is the castle which is also at this same (abandoned) location:

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