This is a fun shot to take, nearby is a great set of derelict railway tracks, full of stories and atmosphere.  I confess to having to put this yellow flower in the this spot, it was sacrificed for the greater good of the photo, a good death!

first thing to say about this shot is, it was hot, very damn hot, and laying down on the ground to take this shot was very uncomfortable, the heat burned my belly several times.  I figure that if it don't hurt a little you should be trying harder.

I tried to find out what type of flower that is, not much luck, if any of you know pass it on.

I guess it is the juxtaposition of man made and nature made that draws me to this shot.  No matter how strong us humans think we are, nature will always have the upper hand, it will take back this planet, and do it in the most beautiful of ways.

 

For this shot I needed a fast shutter speed, mainly because lying still on hot coals ain't easy and I didn't want camera shake to be an issue. The shallow depth of field that a wide open aperture would have given me, would have to little detail of the sleepers going back, I think I would have lost the repetitive element of the tracks to the bokeh.

Bokeh for those not familiar, is the out of focus areas around the main subject of a photograph.

I stopped down my aperture to f22 the lens I was using will go all the way to f32. So I could of had a lot more focus, as it was I could get a shutter speed of 160th but that meant I had to raise my ISO to 400, don't normally like to do this, the higher the ISO the worse the picture quality.  So this is a compromise I made with the scorch marks on my gut.

The lens was a100 mm macro, on the Canon 5d mk3