So I see this large Dandelion head on the nature strip out front as I'm mowing the lawn. And I realise what a great opportunity it would be to get a PAD; I had a brilliant vision of the macro lens catching the seed heads being blown away from the Dandelion.

So I carefully mow around it and when I'm done I come back with the camera. First mistake, not trying hard enough to mount the camera on a tripod or some other kind of support. Because although the Dandelion is down very, very low, the camera still needs a stable platform for what I have in mind. Sitting on the ground is not stable enough since there is nothing to support the lens.

My second mistake was not being familiar enough with the E-M1's shutter controls. Although it does have a program mode it's limited to selecting between two and 10 frames shot one second apart. No, there is no option to vary the gap in the timing. It is one second and one second only. This does not help.

My third mistake was forgetting how out of condition I am so that I don't really have the strength of wind to be able below the heads off strongly enough. In fact, it would be fair to say that many elite athletes don't have the strength of wind to achieve the result that I had in mind either; I would have been far better off finding some kind of air pump (such as the one that I keep in my boot for the tyres) to do the blowing. Not that it mattered because with a gap of one second between exposures I'd have to be pretty lucky for the timing to work out.

In any case, I present to you the shattered remains of the Dandelion head after the first (catastrophically failed) attempt at doing that glorious shot of the seeds flying away.