When I began getting serious about photography, I wondered how to find “my artistic voice.” Lots of artists talked about it but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what my artistic voice was.
Over time I learned that a big part of my artistic voice comes from asking the question, “What speaks to me?”
What speaks to me…
As you can see nature and flowers are a big part of what speaks to me.
I have been making photographs of flowers since I first became serious about becoming a better photographer. When I first began making photos of flowers they were awful. It took making thousands of photos of flowers for me to figure out what worked and what didn’t work.
In the beginning I often copied the styles of other photographers whose images I liked. It taught me a lot about photography and about photographing flowers. But it didn’t feel authentic to me. Over time I developed my own style.
In the past few years I’ve photographed so many flowers, that I sometimes wonder if there is still something new to create with flower photography. But there always is, so long as I find something to love about the flowers in front of me. Unless a plant or bouquet of flowers really speaks to me, I don’t try to photograph them. I’ve learned that if I don’t feel in love with them I can’t create beautiful photographs of them.
Flowers and more flowers…
Earlier this week I found this beautiful cyclamen plant at the Food Coop where I shop. There was just something about the rich color and beautiful shapes of it’s flowers that spoke to me. So I bought the plant and brought it home. I began making photographs right away and most of them ended up being “throw-aways.” Nothing seemed to be working.
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
― Bloodchild and Other Stories
The color of the flowers on this cyclamen plant have been incredibly challenging to depict in the photograph as my eye sees them. I don’t know why but purples, pinks, reds, and magentas are the colors most likely to not photograph as my eye sees them. I’ve been tweaking all sorts of things trying to get them to look the way I see them. So far, my results have been mixed with more failures than success.
Using Color Checker to set the colors correctly in my editor program
But I keep coming back to these flowers and going deeper and deeper in my explorations with them. I can only do that if I’ve fallen in love with the flowers enough to persist through taking lots of bad images and failed experimental images to get to the images that I love.
Editing images with the plant sitting right beside me so that I can see the actual color beside the screen color
Love, persistence, and beauty
I get up close, try different viewpoints and angles, experiment with depth of field, play around with light levels, feeling my way to the truth of these flowers for me. I image at the top of this post was one of the last images I made and it is my favorite. I adjusted my settings and the light in my dining room studio so that I could get fairly long exposures (3-6 seconds). Then I zoomed all the way in on the flower, began the exposure. After a couple of seconds I slowly zoomed the lens back out. During editing, I blurred parts of the image and then added a texture layer on top of the image.
Persistence and luck
Experimenting like this is as much luck and persistence as skill. Using camera movement is much more likely to end up a blurry mess than it is to create something interesting and beautiful. I persist because I find it fascinating when something turns out well.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
―
When I began making images, I photographed anything and everything. Flowers have been something I come back to again and again. I am moving from creating realistic depictions of flowers to attempts at creating abstract beauty based on flowers. It is devilishly difficult creating pleasing abstractions and I hope to learn more as I dig deeper in finding what speaks to me.
What speaks to you?
May you walk in beauty.
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