it's not as easy as it might look

I'm a real fan of the intimate landscape scene and the images I can make from them.  You know the sort of thing I mean - piles of leaves, an interestingly placed acorn maybe or some fallen wild teasel like in the picture below.

Nikon D700, Micro Nikkor 105mm f2.8
1/60th of a second at f4, ISO 200
tripod, self-timer release
8 images stacked in Helicon Focus

And I also really enjoy looking at these types of images other photographers make and display.  One of my most favourite is called Simon Booth, and in one of his recent videos (he has a YouTube channel too) he challenged us to make some of these more intimate images.

Easy, you might think?  But an integral part of the challenge was to put your camera bag down on the ground and shoot all your images within sight of it.  This really elevated the challenge to a higher degree of difficulty.  While it might be easy to find a really good scene, would you then find another two or more in the vicinity?

Well, I did get three images (watch my video below to see them) but the exercise was a bit of a failure for me, as I wasn't really happy with any of the images I got in the end.  While they may have looked OK through my viewfinder, once transferred onto the larger screen they were all a bit, well, meh!

I think the problem lay with putting myself under pressure to find images.  Normally I just stumble upon them as I myself stumble along slowly.  I can normally just see them.  But when I went looking?  Well, the outcome was somewhat different.