Skeet Shoot

Sorry for the misleading title. It does come around to it though just wait and see. The image is a profusion of some wild daisies that are scattered beautifully over a field.In fact it was their very profusion that caught my eye. I was driving home from picking up my dog Luke's medicine at the vet when I remembered that I wanted to pick some pyracantha berries for a bird image that I need to shoot for a bird photography book. So I was checking the roadsides for red berries. In any case these wonderful daisies caught my eye as I passed the field they were in.

I parked my car and walked out to where they were the thickest. I shot at a very low angle to emphasize their profusion as they were almost a carpet . In fact I placed the camera body on the ground to get the perspective that I was looking for. I also stopped way down to F22.0 to get a lot of depth of field. I later cropped it to a pano to remove the buildings and trees that were in the background as I wanted just the flowers.


Now about the skeet shooting part. Many years back this field of wildflowers was quite extensive and covered many, many acres. At that time it was the local skeet shooting range and was protected from development due to its usage. Times change and the city purchased the property for use as soccer fields. The topsoil was removed to get rid of the potential lead poisoning hazard from the lead pellets used for skeet shooting. I thought this would be the end of the wild flowers but for some reason they managed to regain coverage of the fields back after a few seasons. Finally though the city put in the soccer fields and there is just this little patch of daisies at one end of the fields. I do see scattered daisies starting to make there way into the fields though. It is also cute to see young girls on the sidelines wearing daisy crowns that some of them have weaved into their hair. In any case I wanted to try and recapture that feeling of fields of daisies.

Sincerely and God bless,

chris