Three Days of Flower Play

It’s that time of year when it’s easy to find ranunculus flowers in the flower markets around town. I picked up two small bunches of them Thursday and I’ve been playing with them each day.

I love to photograph these papery many-layered flowers! One of the things that I’ve learned about photographing flowers is that I need to go back to photograph them day after day to really push my creative boundaries. The flowers change a bit each day but I also find that when I push myself to see something different about them than I saw before, that I do. And that often it is the photographs I make 3-4 days in that are my favorites.

Here’s a view of the flowers when I brought them home. You can see the variety of sizes and the way their stems bend every which way.

I used my Canon 50 mm f/1.8 lens on the tripod with different lengths of extension tubes to get my closeups of the flowers. I’ve been noticing lately that when I get really closeup and use the magnified live-view on the back of my camera I’m having difficulty seeing whether I’ve got everything in focus (I always use manual focus on tripod flower photos). Darn it! I have an eye checkup scheduled to see if I need new glasses or if it is cataracts that are affecting my vision.

Back to flower play and creativity…

I find that the more that I come back to the same bunch of flowers over and over with the intention of seeing something different, the more that I DO see something different or another view that I would like to photograph. For the photographers reading this, I’ve begun the practice of always photographing the same view of the flowers at 4 different apertures: f/1.8, f/4.0, f/8.0, and f/16. That way I go from the shallowest depth of field to the deepest depth of field. It is difficult for me to know ahead of time whether a particular view will look better soft and dreamy or fully in focus. Sometimes I like both soft and in focus views. The softer views are often more abstract and I tend to like them the best.

But for flowers like ranunculus with all of their papery layers, soft images don’t show off the beauty of the layers of petals. So I play with the different apertures and decide afterwards which images I prefer.

“Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

It’s probably a bit different in other creative pursuits. But I find that my daily practice of photographing a few flowers is akin to sitting down to write everyday (as in shitty first drafts kind of writing). A lot of the images I make I never use. But it is the practice and the repetition that helps me to grow and explore as an artist.

May you walk in beauty.