Photography Lunch ~ Woodland Hills Park
I brought my camera to work with me today. Camera, flash, all the lenses… the whole getup. I really only needed one lens, to take a simple generic photo for work, but you never know when you’ll want to walk around taking photos in the sunshine, so I brought the whole 100-pound bag of photo gear. (100 pounds is an exaggeration. Slightly.)
When lunchtime came along, Steve asked me, “What do you want to do for lunch?”
“Take pictures,” I said. Like I often do.
“Um, well don’t you want to eat?” he asked.
“Okay, if we have time, lets do that too.”
After grabbing a bite to eat at Yoshi’s Japanese Restaurant (where the sushi was a huge disappointment, and where I also spilled scalding miso soup on my hand) we went searching for a little neighborhood park that I had stumbled upon three years earlier, when scouting parks for wedding locations. I knew it was in the area, and I vaguely remembered it having a boardwalk of trails through tall grasses and trees. We went hunting with the help of mobile Google Maps (thanks Google!), and eventually found it tucked away in an old part of Murray. Woodland Hills Park is it’s name, and it’s a small unique little patch of land.
But Woodland Hills Park had a real treasure for me today: dead dried thistles. The sun was hitting them just right, and there was a whole meadow full of them.
Don’t those first two look straight out of a Tim Burton movie? I can totally see Jack Skellington handing one to Sally to put into her hair. I was in love with those thistles.
I wandered along the path a bit more to get a wider shot of the thistle meadow. I squatted down (I know, attractive) and as I was shooting, I noticed an unpleasant odor. I said to Steve, “Ew… I smell poo.”
He said, “Um, that’s because Dog poo is everywhere! Oh my God. Don’t move. You’re literally centimeters from sitting in poo.”
I looked down, and sure enough, I had squatted down right above a huge pile of dog poo. Inches from my foot, centimeters from my bum. GROSS. Luckily I managed to snap this shot before jumping up and bolting away from the thistle field of poo.
As we wandered further down the boardwalk path, I began to hear birds scurrying everywhere. In the underbrush, bushes and overhead in the trees. BIRDS! That means Spring is a stone-throw away, people! They were pretty timid, hiding deep in the thicket of sticks. I did manage to capture one, though… and because it seemed to fit his personality, I gave his photo this cool texture treatment.
As I was looking in the trees for birds, I noticed one tree was clinging to some gorgeous red berries… ones that had clearly been there since last Autumn. I snapped a quick photo, which turned out to be my favorite photo of the day. Something about aquamarine with that shade of red just gets me going.
By this time, our lunch our was long over. As we wandered back to the car, I tried snapping some photos of Steve. He’s learned the tricks of my telephoto lens, though, and he knows that to avoid getting his photo taken all he has to do is quickly get close to me… too close for the telephoto to capture him. He zipped right up to me, all smug and giggly. So I put my lens cap on, and put my camera around his neck. “Here, then. You can just take it.” So he did. And as we walked back along the path, he turned the tables and snapped a sunlit photo of me. And since I was feeling very textured today, I gave my own photo the birds texture treatment, too.
It’s really great what an extra 10 minutes on your lunch break in a park on a sunny day can do. I am so looking forward to this Summer!
I’m really itching for Spring!! So close!!
Those curly thistles are just beautiful! It’s like they were posing just for you. …or trying to trick you into sitting in poop.