This time of year, when it’s cold outside I like to pick up some cut flowers for some flower play with my camera.

Flower Play

Last week I picked up a tiny bouquet of gerbera daisies. They were pretty shades of pink, yellow, white, and beige. These little lovelies provided me with photo flower play for over a week. The photo below, of my backdrop setup was made today—you can see some of the flowers are starting to droop, another reason for more flower play.

Today I thought I would share some of my flower play with you. I set up a photo set on a buffet in my dining room where the daytime light is indirect and lovely.

“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan W. Watts

My favorite backdrop is the white backside of a large matboard with a piece of wide parchment paper long enough to cover the matboard and drape down onto the surface of the buffet. I place a white cloth napkin under the parchment paper on top of the buffet and this creates a seamless white backdrop that lets me create the high key flower photos I like.

I have a few vases that I like to use, tiny translucent colored vases and others that I have collected.

Over the course of a week (or however long the flowers last) I spend anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours each day making photographs of the flowers using different angles, arrangements, vases, and lenses.

I like to explore the full beauty of the flowers, letting my love of their beauty and the light draw me into a space of play.

By having the flowers in a place that I walk by many times during the day, I invite myself to see them in different light, to appreciate their beauty from afar and close up, to enter into a relationship with them.

When working on creating compositions of groups of flowers, I try to remember the “rule of 3” and often pick three interesting flowers to place in a single vase, or three tiny vases with one flower each.

But I also take the rule with a grain of salt. I’m not sure why an odd number of objects is more interesting in composition than an even number, but I think it has to do with movement and balance. Even numbers of objects tend to create a kind of static balance that is often less interesting than odd numbers of objects which create a more dynamic balance.

That’s not always true, however. As you can see in the photo above I used 4 flowers, but because of the different direction of movement of the drooping gerbera daisy, I think it works.

“We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.”
― Charles E. Schaefer

I don’t consciously think of all these things when I am photographing. I go by a sense of what feels good to me or what feels interesting. Sometimes I later discover that I don’t like the photograph at all, but sometimes I am pleasantly surprised.

I also make experiments where I deliberately break composition rules.

Sometimes I am happy with the results of my experiments. Sometimes I’m not.

After the I make the photographs, there is still work to be done. Editing photos is an art that I love and I can spend hours trying different treatments on the photographs I make. As time goes by I find my skills increase and my eye for what to look for in a photograph has changed.

If you make photographs but you never print them, you are missing out on half the fun. After making careful edits there is nothing I like more than making prints of some of my work. I always make test prints and adjust the edits before creating my final image.

I’ve heard film photographers talk about the magic of making prints when the image appears seemingly out of nowhere. I feel similarly about my digital print process. When the image emerges from the printer and I can pick it up and hold it in my hand, it always feels like magic to me.

I like to keep test prints propped up to look at in my studio, just for fun. These are recent test prints I made for Etsy orders. It amazes me sometimes when I look at them and think about the photos I made when I first picked up a camera.