it was too cold to take the dog out for a walk today, and i have a head cold, which required a day of recuperating. but i stil had to do a photo for STILL, so i went to gather a bouquet of roadside black-eyed susan stems. it wouldn’t be long before they were bent and buried under the snow, so i had been thinking i had better nab them while i could. i had already planned the photo in my mind: i was going to shoot the bouquet top down with a very shallow depth of field (f2.8), so the seed heads would appear like a constellation, with only a few in focus and the rest fading to a soft blur. so i did that, and it was just okay. then i had a thought: all the stems looked a lot like a wigwam, so i tried to capture a sort of arched ribbed ceiling effect. it was . . .  just okay. ok, let’s try just the seed heads, in a roughly random pattern on white paper. meh. just okay. by now, my energy and my light were both fading, and i was about to make the best of “meh,”  when i noticed the sort of beautiful random mess of seeds that the black-eyed susan heads had released due to my not-so-tender ministrations. in the end, the byproduct of the process was more interesting than the process itself. my carving was a failure. but the wood shavings fell artfully.

black eyed susan seeds

vadnais lake trail, saint paul, minnesota