Drive-by Shooting

One of the things I very much enjoy when I’m photographing often (heck, even thinking about making photographs can get me doing this), is that you start to frame things you see as potential photographic images even though you may not even have a camera with you.  As you know, most of us do have cameras with us, and that’s why every so often you’ll find an iPhone image on the blog post.  In those instances, the image I saw was so compelling that it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a real camera with me, the image had to be made so I used the one I had on me.

Now, while I don’t recommend that people do the visual framing exercise while driving (and certainly not while driving in Portugal), I have to confess that it happened to me last weekend.  It’s not that I was actively trying to do it, but an image jumped out at me that made me have to go back and make it.  While I didn’t have a camera with me when I saw it (other than my phone), I was fortunate enough to live right across the street from where I saw it.  

As I was slowing down to pull into our driveway, the sun came out and cast a shadow on a wall off to my right.  Here’s roughly what I saw . . .

. . . that’s our home, just to the right of the white car on the left side of the image.  

I was coming home from a quick trip to Lidl (a grocery store, where we like to buy, among other things, fresh squeezed orange juice and our meats).  I quickly unloaded the bag of groceries and grabbed the Q2MR from the table in the dining area (where earlier I had been adjusting the quick access menu items) and headed across the street.

Fortunately, I managed a quick couple of images before the clouds rolled in again.  This was the image I envisioned when I saw it from the car.

I made a few more images as the clouds varied the intensity of the shadows.  None of them are as interesting as when the wall was well-lit.  You lose the shadow line of the light pole along the granite pavers as well as the shadow of the weeds on the wall.  

It just proves that it always pays to keep your eyes open and to have a camera with you!