Trimming the Bush

Okay, I admit it: In a few areas of my life I still procrastinate. I go too long between haircuts. I might have 11,000 miles on the car before I take it in for its 10,000-mile service. Sometimes the basenjis get their Heartgard on the third or the fourth of the month instead of the first. And I usually let the front bushes get a little "Amazon" before trimming them back. Such was the case until this past weekend:


In some ways I'm happy that I waited as long as I did because I was able to take a couple of interesting pictures. I finally bought a book to help me with my photo woes; the subtitle really caught my attention: Simple Techniques for Taking Better Pictures. Its author, John Hedgecoe, claims that photographers have to "see the potential in a subject." So I took the camera outside and shot this:


I used the "portrait" setting so that I got the crisp foreground in contrast to the blurred background. I like this photo because it looks like a serpent or a sea monster tentacle slithering towards the viewer. And the bush was indeed acting like a dragon: snatching at the car as I pulled into the garage, slapping at my face as I walked past it to the front stairs.

Not everything about the bush was reptilian, though. I also took this picture which reminds me of a flock of ducks heading south for the winter:


What I like about these pictures is that I took them on my residential street in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, but I could say that I shot them during a trek through El Yunque and no one would know that I was lying!

After the camera came the clippers, reducing my "rainforest" to landscaping that makes my neighbors happy:


The basenjis, meanwhile, sat on the back porch, hot and bored: