2020—Always Someone Else’s Fault

I blame it on my neighbor.  I didn’t plan to return to a life of crime.  But after only two days on the straight and narrow, I was confronted with an overwhelming temptation that I couldn’t resist.  That neighbor, with as much time on his hands as everyone else, has failed to mow his lawn.  What once was a swath of green has become a vast field of dandelions!  There were two that had turned to puffs and were ripe for picking, both temptingly on the edge of the sidewalk.  This time, I didn’t even look over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching me.  I leaned down and plucked them both.  I am not sure what section of the penal code I may have violated. The puffs were filched from private property this time, not public right of way as my previous crime spree was. 

The scene of the crime is just a hundred or so feet from my home, just two houses away.  It will probably be pretty easy to track me down if the dandelions left a trail of seed evidence leading to my front door.  My neighbor’s Ring camera probably recorded me in the act.  At least I wasn’t wearing my Bruno Maglis.  I am suddenly lumped in with the miscreants who skulk the neighborhood at night peeking in car windows and jiggling door handles and stealing packages from doorsteps.  I don’t think I can take it any more.  I’ll come clean. I confess!  I did it!  I stole a noxious weed!

OK.  Now that I have that off my chest, I can get to today’s image.  As a follow up to my Tiny Dancers image a few days ago (again, with apologies to Elton John), I wanted to create a focus shift image of a whole dandelion puff.  However, despite making several sets using different exposures and apertures, numbers of images and starting points for focus, I was unsuccessful.  As stacked images, the center of the dandelion was blurry in each one with significant ghosting.  I’m not sure what I did wrong.  In the end, I decided to use a very small aperture and long exposure which created the look I was trying to achieve with focus shifting and I managed to get it with only a single image.