Been a few weeks since my last post, but we have been quite busy around our house with a remodel project. We decided to have a few friends (30 or so) over last Saturday night to help celebrate the 100th birthday of our house and let them see the work we have done. Several folks brought flowers for the evening. Another friend took the flowers and put them into vases for the dinner tables (thanks Lynne!). That gave me the thought to go to a topic out of sequence for what I originally wanted to explore in this blog. Flowers… let’s look at floral images!
I usually don’t take pictures of picked flowers and prefer those that are still firmly attached to the ground.
But the gift of flowers gave me the opportunity to take pictures of plants and flowers we didn’t already have. These first two pictures are of a couple of the bouquets for the evening. Nothing really special about these images other than the pretty flowers in the vases.
One of the key things about photography is to take pictures of what people think they see as opposed to what is really there. Our minds alter what the eye sees. That is hard to replicate with a camera lens. For example, when you see a full moon as it rises over the horizon, we see it in relation to the buildings, trees, or whatever is in our line of sight. But if you remove those objects (i.e., look through a tube to isolate the moon), the moon looks smaller. You can use a telephoto lens to replicate what your mind sees in this case.
Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that a good photograph captures what is really there… but a photograph is simply a two dimensional image that captured a moment in time. A great photograph is one that includes the intangible things such as mood, feeling, texture, time, and more. It makes you linger a moment and think. One of the things I noticed about the way people looked at the floral arrangements we had on the tables is that they got closer to the flowers to examine them. Sometimes they would smell them. Sometimes feel them. And other times simply look at them from different angles. So I decided to take a closer look myself — and use my camera to do it.
I started with a dahlia plant.
Most people would just go with this type of image (above). What if we focus on a single flower? How about this one that looks like a turboprop?
What does it look like from the back or when the petals are highlighted by the sun?
Now for the flowers in the vases. Looking at the bouquets we see the colors and textures of a few of the blooms.
The red folds of the petals draw you in. The happy, abstract purple and white pattern is worth getting lost in.
Then again, the gentle white flower with its delicate edges might just bring a sense of calming.
Going a little closer brings up to the more otherworldly side of things. what we see seems not of this planet or a little abstract.
Perhaps the image brings a thought of flames or purple eyelids.
Or perhaps the image is just an abstract set of lines and color destined to fill a two by three foot void on a wall somewhere and become a focal point for thought.
That is the way I look at a bouquet of flowers.
– Eric
