Teazle Sky
In sharp contrast to yesterday‘s gentle seed pictures, I approached this spiky teazle with more caution and from a distance.
I used the Takumar 200mm lens partly because this is in the neighbour’s yard and I did not feel like going through Ruby’s Gate to get at it, and I had the longer lens handy after shooting the apples in the adjacent neighbour’s yard. Besides which, I have tangled with teazle from time to time, and its a pain.
I had forgotten to change the ISO from a previous picture, so it was set at 1000. Not sure of the aperture, but probably pretty wide open because the shutter speed was 1/8000th.
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burnt embers 
Pretty color contrast of the teasel head and the blue sky. They are prickly – watch out!
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Hi Tom – thanks for coming by my blog. I am very taken by your photos – nice to know about your site. And, thanks for the comment – even thick gloves are not always enough protection.
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Stunning photo. The simplicity of the color contrast and framing really works!
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Hi composer – thank you. It’s really great to hear that after the number of different crops that I tried without them feeling right.
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very interesting composition!
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thank you so much mimo.
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Another that I love 🙂
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Juanita – I love your comments! Thank you.
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I really like the composition – it’s almost architectural. Though I spell teasel differently than you, I like it for photography too, both summer and off-season. It self-sows in our yard and grows huge – many of them are taller than me. I hadn’t realized for the first few years we had it that it actually sets mauve-coloured flowers in summer – small but quite pretty. If you’re interested, I have a photo on my site of our teasel in flower, with bees working it (search “teasel” and it’ll come up).
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Hi Laurie, thanks for your comment. I like it that your blog is searchable, but here is a link if anyone is interested. Teasel, teasle, teazel, teazle and so on. Could spend quite a bit of time searching for that particular word. That’s a great picture of a bee hard at work, and nice to see a teazle looking softer and more inviting than they do at this time of the year. The ones in this garden are about 8 feet tall. This link goes to another picture of mine of teazle – in a different part of the same garden that gives a better sense of the height, though I think that this photo is less interesting than today’s one is.
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I’ve had my run-ins with these and they always win. They look like instruments of torture. The photo is the exact opposite, well composed and very well lit, it brings out the beauty in the plant. No noise for ISO 1000, too. Very nice
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Hi ken – you are so right, they do always win. Clothes and skin suffer. Thanks for your compliments. The camera continues to amaze me with its performance at higher ISO settings. It was sharper but the compression for WP loading took quite a bit out of this image. Probably means it could have been sharper to begin with.
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I really like the composition in this one. Simple and uncluttered. Well done indeed! I would suspect the getting mixed up with one of these is a painful experience!
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Hi dh – thanks a lot. I struggled quite a bit with the crop, because the full frame image was poorly composed and yet I thought there was something in the photo that was worth salvaging, without being similar to a lot of the other teazle shots that are out there.
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