Weeds and Light Leaks

The end of my street is slowly being taken over by massive plants with purple flowers. I have no idea what they are, but they’re huge and they grow really quickly. They actually look pretty cool and when I arrived home the other day on an afternoon that was both sunny and windy, I decided to photograph the gigantic plant-monsters waving around like they were about to take off.

This photo was created with the help of a toy that I’ve had for a while but still haven’t used for its intended purpose. The toy in question is a selection of plain and graduated neutral density filters. They’re super cheap unbranded ones from Amazon because I have no idea how much I’ll actually use them so I didn’t want to fork out loads of cash straight away. One day I will take photos with glassy water and soft blurry clouds by virtue of owning these filters, but this was not that day. This was the day when I asked “What if I left a big gap between the lens and the filters during a long exposure so light could randomly creep in around the sides?”, then I shot this answer.

There was a bit of dust on the filters which I chose not to clean off because I wanted to see what it would do. I used a plain and a graduated filter here, the plain one to allow me to use a long exposure in bright sunlight and the graduated one to stop the sky from being blown out (in as much as concepts like over-exposure even matter in photos like this). I would love to tell you exactly which filters I used but I have no idea as it doesn’t actually say on them what they are. They were £17 for 8 filters, the holder and all the adapter rings I will ever need in my life, so I was happy to make that sacrifice.

The above photo was taken with my lovely little Holga-for-dSLR lens which I am starting to have proper emotions about. It’s likely that I’ll never stop raving about how much I love it and after owning it – sorry, sharing my life with it – for only a few weeks, it has awakened a sense of artistic freedom verging on wild abandon. Probably the best £13 I ever spent.

I just realised I’m the photographer equivalent of the person who says “How awesome is this sweater? It was £2 from a charity shop!”.

Actually, I’m that person too :-)

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