I spent some time this afternoon stretched out on the walkway to my front door trying to get a ground-level photograph of a whimsical garden head leering out from behind the azaleas. It was not easy, mainly because my body doesn’t seem to be able to get down and back up again as easily as it once did and the ground is certainly harder than I ever remember it being, even with a kneeling pad which I placed strategically under my hip. I placed the camera on a magazine so it wouldn’t get scraped up from the concrete walkway and I flipped on “live view” on the camera so I only had to contort my head a little bit to see what I was doing. I tried several different shots and views, struggling up and into the house to download the photos, being unimpressed with any, and returning to the damp concrete. I got this shot on my fourth trip out, after I had taken a completely out of focus one by mistake but after seeing its composition I realized that the shot I was seeking was an in-focus azalea and an out-of-focus head, not the other way around which was my original intention. I think the azalea could have been in better focus but by the time I got this version, I was done with the ups and downs!
