This week I bought a bunch of white iris at the florist. I was intrigued by the perfect elegance and beauty of these flowers. They are not a color that I typically associate with iris and I’d never seen white iris before.
When I bring home a bouquet of flowers to photograph I usually begin by taking a few images of the entire bouquet. Then I begin to isolate a few flowers or a single flower for more close-up images.
Typically iris flowers have three main petals per flower. But one magnificent flower in this bouquet had five main petals. I’ve never seen an iris like it. It got much of my attention.
Often my initial view of the flowers and take on photographing them is fairly mundane.
The first photos I made with these flowers disappointed me. I tried a white backdrop and a black velvet backdrop. But nothing seemed to be working and many of my shots were awkward, boring or just plain ugly.
“The song we’re composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.”
― Do the Work
Go Deeper
I’ve learned that this is part of the creative process for me. Often I start out at the surface and produce mundane ordinary images. If I stick with it and keep working I eventually go deeper. Then the work gets more unique and true to who I am and to my unique vision.
If I had one piece of advice to give to any creative person, it would be to go deeper. It takes time to bring out the deepest parts of ourselves and our unique vision. I make tens of thousands of photographs each year. Only a few turn out to be “keepers.” I’m not sure if this is true for painters and writers and other creators, but it seems to me that a lot of what we create is thrown away but is a necessary part of the process.
On the second day of photographing the white iris flowers the sky was overcast and my dining room studio was so dark that my exposures were quite long. I decided to play around with camera movement so I held the lens steady for about half of the exposure time and then moved it slowly in a circular pattern for the last half of the exposure.
It takes time to decide
With the black background, the movement caused ghostly white shadows behind a mostly solid central flower image. Initially I was quite taken with these images. Now, not so much. This is another thing I’ve learned about my creative process. The things that I love immediately I often see differently a day or a week later. And things I was not so happy with right away often catch my eye at a later date and I see something that speaks to me. That’s one reason that I don’t throw away anything but obviously technically flawed images (out of focus, bad exposure, etc.).
“Sometimes on Wednesday I’ll read something that I wrote on Tuesday and I’ll think, “This is crap. I hate it and I hate myself.” Then I’ll re-read the identical passage on Thursday. To my astonishment, it has become brilliant overnight. Ignore false negatives. Ignore false positives. Both are Resistance. Keep working.”
― Do the Work
So long as the flowers are not fading and withering I keep photographing them. It’s often on the third or fourth day of working on them that I make a significant break-through. On the third day of photographing these iris I switched the backgrounds around again. I put on a photo extension tube to let me get closer to a single flower. Slowly, slowly I honed in on what I found beautiful about these flowers and found ways to express it in my images.
These turned out to be my favorite images of these flowers.
If you are frustrated with your creative process my best advice is to keep creating. Be patient. Let yourself go deeper. It takes time to build skills. It takes time to discover and express your own unique voice.
“The opposite of fear is love—love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.”
― Do the Work
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