Leaves. Millions of them. All mine.

I was on a 7-day vacation last week and spent a couple of days in a park in Cleveland.

You might already know about that. Meanwhile, there were leaves in the yard. So I had a couple of days of fun but the yard work was piling up by the minute and I had already spent two days away.

On the third day, I found that my lawnmower would run for only five minutes per day. Not cool. The next day, I found that my lawnmower could not be repaired by a lawnmower repair guy. Way not cool. A day later, I found that suitable used lawnmowers are impossible to locate. Still not cool. On the sixth day, I found that suitable new lawnmowers are out of season and have given way to snow blowers instead. Totally not cool.

Then I got a little lucky and now I have a lawnmower. And it is very, very cool.
See, it mulches while it cuts, so I use it to grind the leaves into dust instead of raking them around.

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Why mention this on a photography blog? Well, the slideshow, mostly. You don’t need to use a tripod for this pair of shots, btw. You will, however, need to use two focus points in your viewfinder to line up point A and point B in your Before shot to line up with the same points in your After shot. Obviously, you’ll need to shoot from the same place, and from the same angle, and with the same exposure.

If you’re not worried about theft, then use a tripod and leave the camera alone between the before and after shots. I used only one focus point for line-up on this one and lived to be sorry. That’s why the trees move. You must use two points and two focus sensors, ya hear? Three would be better.)

Photoshop will let you animate from one to the other (Window—> animation) though it’s not exactly intuitive and the steps involved are way past the scope of this post (and if you’re a WordPress blogger, “slideshow” is the only way to go for this kind of thing), but yeah, animation CAN BE a part of photography.

Also, and much more importantly, make sure to do routine maintenance on your lawnmower so you don’t ever have to buy another one. Good luck with having fun with yard work. Photos might make it better.

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