This is just few of the different ways I photographed gerbera daisies last week. Most of them were “failures” but I learned something from making each photograph.
When I am making photographs of flowers I try lots of ways to arrange them, including using different focal lengths, angles, lighting, and backgrounds. I move the camera closer and farther away, photograph the front of the flowers and the backs, try different lighting and props. Many of my experiments don’t work. But occasionally they trigger an idea that I find does work.
Happy Accidents and Other Creative Myths
It is tempting to attribute an interesting photo that I create as a happy accident. But I believe that it’s not just an accident when I create something new that I think is good.
First of all I need to show up with my camera, willing to make a lot of bad photographs that I will never use. I do this because I love what I’m doing and because making photos makes my heart sing.
If I didn’t show up with my camera every day there would be no happy accidents. I believe the same is true for any creative endeavor — writing, painting, singing, dancing, making pottery — whatever it is that humans make and create. We don’t become masters of our craft overnight. It takes lots of practice and experimentation.
“No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.”
― Upstream: Selected Essays
Persistence and Experimentation
We try lots of different things in our creative pursuits. Some of them work and some fail magnificently. And occasionally a failure triggers a new idea. That happened for me this week when I was working with bright sunlight bathing my flowers and creating deep shadows behind them.
The contrasty bright light wasn’t working at all. But when I noticed the dark shadow of the flowers I wondered whether I could photograph the shadow without the flowers in the image. It took a few tries and some help from my husband holding up the white background at different angles. But I finally found an angle that worked.
While it may not be my favorite image of the flowers, I like it. It feels somewhat like a poem to me. The beauty of it is in its mystery.
“Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work.”
― Upstream: Selected Essays
Wishing you a week of boundless creativity and experiments that make your heart sing.
May you walk in beauty.
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