Blowin' in the Wind

Maybe because I'm naturally very near-sighted -- I couldn't make out the large E on the top of the eye chart without my glasses when I was 6 -- I've always been drawn to "blur shots."  To my eye, the colors are richer, the emotion deeper.  I always think blur gives a photo a sense of time passing.

This photo was taken on the ridge road just above the farmhouse we stayed at in a small Tuscan town near San Gimignano.  The time was late afternoon.  

I photographed a lot of olive trees while I was there.  The Tuscans take their olive trees very seriously -- they are reverently tended and can be wonderfully old and gnarly.  It was a windy day, so rather then use a fast ASA/ISO to stop the action, I used a slower speed to capture the leaves blowing in the wind.  The trick to this kind of shot is to keep part of it in sharp focus -- in this case, the trunk -- so it looks like you really meant it to look this way rather than you were just not paying attention to what you were doing.