Day 74: Floor of Green

2026-04-21

Back at the gardens...

Hello!

I walked into this desert exhibit, with loads of succulents both tall and small. One of my common struggles with photography is that I don't fill the frame enough. When I take portraits, I walk back and get full-body photographs. If I take pictures of a flower, I'll surround it with context. The technique of continuous patterns, and close-up subjects, still requires conscious effort.

So that effort comes through in this photo! There was a large field of these green (blue?) succulents and I found the one spot where I could fill the frame with just these plants, and without any empty spots or obtrusive obstacles.

The exposure settings are all terrible — I could have added more depth of field so you could see the plants in the back, and I didn't need to keep such a tight shutter speed — but it still looks clean and acceptable.

Today, I'm setting up for a photo walk with my school. An hour or two after writing this, I will be leading a small group of students around the buildings so they can experiment with composition and exposure. I've even got a disposable film camera that they can use, if they trust themselves enough not to waste the shots inside. No idea how I'm supposed to process those, though... we'll see if I'm allowed to post some of those shots on this here website (probably not, since I'm not taking film photos).

Finally, Xikipedia. In-person, I'm an advocate against the current-day digital marketplace of attention and data, going as far as to read an entire book on it a while ago. This pseudo social media feed, stylized as X, is a good example why. A commentary on social media feeds, it shows that all you need is a simple algorithm to keep people hooked. And, if you take it a bit further, all you need are a few tweaks to that algorithm to reflect developer biases and project misinformation.

Cheers,
David