SILVER SPRING MD

A primary reason we visited the Washington D.C. area was to see our daughter Michelle, her fiancé Tobias, and her new home located in Silver Spring, Maryland.  We took a couple of walks in her neighborhood, and I got the following shots.

Michelle's house is located on a beautiful sloped lot with mature trees, including this very tall, gnarly specimen that I shot looking up.

Her front walk involves a diverse set of well-aged paving blocks.  Here's a geometric sample.

On one of our walks we visited a nearby development, known as the Annex, that is undergoing restoration and that features various older buildings of diverse architectural style.  Here are a few shots from that walk.

The first is of a statue of a young hunter who apparently was distraught because he had slain a deer.  I was disappointed with the shot's composition.  My artistic goal was to pose the hunter against the bare limbs of a distant tree, and I liked that, but the result was that in doing so I failed to capture the sculpture's meaning.

Here is a detail from another sculpture, this one much more neglected.

It seems apparent that someone had decided this figure needed a pedicure.

One more sculpture, this of a fountain featuring strange fictional animals.

Initially, this looks like a reclining horse.  However, a closer inspection reveals that the creature's hind quarters are essentially that of a mermaid and its front legs end in fern-like fronds.  In post processing I was able to darken the background to accentuate the sculpture's features.

The Annex is still a work in process, and many components remain in a state of disrepair.  So there were many opportunities for capturing decrepitude.  Here are a couple of examples that I liked for their texture.

'Not sure why I found these shots interesting, but there they are.

The grounds also featured a beautiful, very mature ginkgo tree that was still in full fall color.  I took a few shots of the full tree from a distance, but I didn't like them from a compositional perspective.   Here is a shot that includes Tobias looking for fallen leaves to photograph.  Better, I thought, than a simple shot of the tree by itself.

Later, I spotted a scattering of the tree's leaves on a dark asphalt driveway and took the following.

I worked hard in post processing to further darken the background without overly darkening the leaves.  Not perfect, but I just didn't have the patience to use more artificial methods to blacken the background.  Also, in the end I thought the particular scattering of leaves could have been better chosen from a compositional viewpoint.  I tried to improve matters by cropping the image down to eliminate some of the larger vacant spaces.

Still not great, but better.

Finally, I thought I would include a photo of the two most important women in my life.

John