"You can observe a lot by watching."

My afternoon wandering along Golden Eagle Avenue by the college got me to thinking about photos I used to make into greeting cards and post cards.  What makes a scene post-card-worthy?  I guess it depends on who's buying.  While I was consciously on the lookout for insects and spiders, the first thing that gave me the urge to take a picture was a patch of Teasel.  I have always loved this plant.  Covered with thorns, ot has often painfully interrupted my pursuit of an insect photograph.  But, in the end, the architecture of the whole plant, but especially its flowers, has won me over.  Technically, it's a weed.  But so am I, having moved from my native Massachusetts to contribute to California's overpopulation. 

Moving closer to the Teasel, I became conscious of the background, should I choose to take another photo.  Sometimes the sky around here is incredibly blue.  Today it seemed especially so in contrast to the haze left by fires just a few days earlier.

The patterns in which the flowers bloom is also intriguing.  Note the ring of purple flowers around the "waist" of the cluster.  Sometimes a ring or two will bloom near the top, or near the bottom, one at each extreme.  Sometimes the entire cluster will be blooming.  I can't help but wonder about the biochemical and/or environmental triggers that produce these results.  Maybe I've been n the sun too long.

After musing on the life of Teasel a while, I started looking at the ground again, as I'm known to do.  Looking at the ground is always more interesting than looking at the screen on m phone.  How  people can spend the better part of each day looking at a phone is beyond me. 
Hidden below the tops of the dried grass was an attractive spread of blooming Orchard Morning Glory, known by people who don't like it as Bindweed. I experimented with composition.

This vertical format appealed to me most.  That led my busy mind to other musings - such as why must photos and most flat art be in rectangular format.  There are some cultures in Africa who still do not recognize rectangles as being special among geometric shapes.  Seems like our entire modern culture has been controlled by things on the right - not just right angles.

I stared at quite a few individual blossoms of St. John's Wort, hoping to find a Crab Spider in its yellow phase.  All the ones I've photographed this season have been white.  I started to get hypnotized by all the overlapping petals of yellow, so stepped back to get one last photo of "the big picture."

No, not quite.

Ah, there it is.  Maybe my next photo greeting card.  Projected sales?  7, to friends and relatives.