More flowers – shooting blind

In two recent photo-posts I've presented "ordinary" shots – nothing fancy, no spectacular colors, strange objects, or self-conscious composition: a friend in his home; three landscapes. Then I posted some shots of flowers where I was shooting blind. Yes, my eyes were open and I did aim the camera, but I wasn't looking through the viewfinder so I didn't know exactly what was in-frame.

Here's some more blind shots of flowers. The first two have been cropped. But still…

It seems unlikely that I'd have taken THAT shot if I'd been looking through the viewfinder. I'd have gotten the whole flower. Of course, I could have cropped it so we didn't have that "empty" area to the left, but I like it.

This one is particularly interesting, as most of it is not in focus:

That's OK. There's no mystery about the fuzzy parts of the image; the color and composition are still there. And I like the play of shadows on the two petals in the foreground.

Again, would I have taken THIS shot if I'd been looking through the viewfinder?

When you're looking through the viewfinder you have almost no choice but to put something at the center of the image; you're going to choose some composition. To be sure, one can be more or less careful about it, but I think you'd have to train yourself quite a bit to deliberately come up with shots like these last two. And it's not at all obvious to me that there'd be any benefit to doing so when you can just as easily get them by shooting blind.

When I'm shooting blind, I'm not looking for anything in particular. Just something that's interesting.

With only a handful of exceptions, I've not done blind shooting on anything but flowers and vegetables.  It's not clear to me how things would work out with ordinary cityscapes and landscapes. The thing about cityscapes and landscapes is that they have very strong up-down orientations. Blind shooting where I hold the camera at odd angles would destroy that. I'm not sure what effect that would have on the resulting images. The up-down orientation isn't so important to flowers (and vegetables).

More later.