Horses See in Telephoto Panorama

Katie and I went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens yesterday to shoot some pictures. It's a lovely garden but I am always reluctant to post MOBOT pictures because everybody loves a flower. It's easy to take a pretty picture here and pretty-easy-pretty-pictures are like cheap milk chocolate to me -- they go down easy but are unremarkable. That's not to say I dislike flower photography, but like anything else, it takes patience and skill and the proper equipment to do it well. In particular, Charles Dana, a local photographer who specializes in flower and fauna close-ups, has an exhibit at MOBOT that was thoroughly interesting to me. He has a great eye for color and getting the focus and light on his close-ups just right.* 

In any case, to try something different, I decided to put a telephoto lens on my camera to photograph the gardens. My main goal was to play with perspective by compressing the sense of depth. To maximize the effect, I was looking for long subjects I could photograph from afar. In the photograph above I was standing roughly fifty yards from the statue of the woman that was roughly fifty yards from the statue of the fish. The result was to squash the perceived distance between the two statues and to fill more of the scene with the floral trim.

Oh yeah, the title of the post was "Horses See in Telephoto Panorama." Well, I guess I have to discuss horse anatomy another time.  

*After I posted this I noticed that Dana has a photo on his Fine Art America page of a fire hydrant that is reminiscent of my cake photos. I've actually considered making the fire hydrants of St. Louis a photography project -- there are some good ones.