Prairie fleabane

Here’s a little wildflower you’ve never before seen in these pages: it’s Erigeron modestus, called prairie fleabane or plains fleabane. This one was part of a group growing on the property of native plant aficionados Dale and Pat Bulla in northwest Austin on March 5.

Although the photographs in this blog often show subjects in sharp detail, here I took a different approach and focused on the front-most ray flowers, knowing that the rays farther back and all of the yellow disk flowers would come out with less detail or hardly any at all: let’s hear it for impressionism. Those among you who are further interested in photography as a craft can verify that points 1, 2, 5, 12 and 20 in About My Techniques apply to today’s image.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman