Sometimes a good place to take a picture is on the side of the road. I often carry my camera with me in the car and kind of lookout for something interesting, especially during wildflower season. Sometimes I see something and plan to come back later in the day when the light is better or the weather is nicer.

One day on the way home from work, I saw all these flowers on the side of the road near a barbed wire fence and I thought that it might make an interesting photo. So, I went home, got my camera, and returned a bit before sunset. I got kind of low and as close to the flowers as I could as I wanted the near-ground flowers and rusty barbed wire in focus and the field in the background to be blurred or bokeh’d. This turned out to be one my favorite photos. See the photo below.

Another photo that I got from the side of the road nearby was some horses in a field of bluebonnets. In the early Spring in Texas, the bluebonnets and other wildflowers come out and there are some great photo opportunities. I saw these horses in a field and went to get some close-ups. As it turned out, the horses weren’t very attractive close up, so I decided to try to put them in the background with the flowers in the foreground. So, I got down low and focused on the horses, so that the near-ground bluebonnets would be blurred. And from down low, it appeared that the bluebonnets were more dense. It also helped that the horses had their head down eating. I did bump the saturation on the bluebonnets a bit because I like the way it looked. See the picture below.

In my town, there was a field with some longhorns in it although the land has since been sold to housing developers. I would drive by these longhorns and think about how nice a picture they’d make, so I would pull over and grab my camera. Almost every time I would do this, the longhorns would turn and walk away so it was very difficult to get any kind of decent shot. Below is the best shot that I managed to get. The longhorn is sort of looking at the camera and standing in the flowers. I even like the telephone pole in the background.

There is a rusty barn that I look at from time-to-time, so one day I decided to see what it would look like in HDR. The sun is low in the afternoon sky, so there are a lot of horizontal shadows and yellow light. I don’t know if this is a great photo, but I like it.

Not far from the high school, there is a place on the side of the road where you can catch a nice sunset and get bitten by insects. I have stopped here many times as it close to the house so if the clouds look interesting, I drive over and set up the tripod. There is a road going off into the pasture with some electrical poles that go off to the horizon and not a lot of city in the way. The image below is an HDR merge of a sunset that I thought was beautiful. Lots of bright orange on the horizon to contrast with the blue sky and the power lines are silhouetted.

Driving through West Texas, I came over a pass and pulled over to take a photo. The highway curves off into the distance with the high cliffs in the background. The sky was a bit hazy and it would have looked better at sunrise, but other than that, I like the photo.

Those are some of my side-of-the-road pictures. I like to keep the camera with me when I am on a drive and see if I can shoot something interesting. Thanks for reading.