Flower Photography

Brrr! It’s cold and blustery outside today. Time for some indoor

Flower Photography

I bought a bunch of white alstroemeria flowers last week. And I’ve been photographing them on and off for days. I love these simple easily available flowers. They last a long time and when I look closely at them I always see a dancing grace in their petals and stems.

Over the past few days the flowers have drawn me in to study them over and over again. Then take a break from whatever else I was doing, put the camera on my tripod, and move in to photograph a particular graceful gesture that I have just seen.

The more closely that I look at flowers the more that I see. Sometimes it takes days for me to find their full beauty and to create photographs that please me.

I’m not done with these flowers yet. They have more stories of beauty and grace to reveal and I plan to take the time to discover them.

Orchid Opulence

I also have a new small orchid plant that is in bloom. And I love it’s grace and beauty as well. In the past I haven’t had much luck getting orchids to bloom a second time. But I’m working with another orchid plant that I bought a couple of years ago trying to coax into bloom again. Last week I decided to re-pot it and soon I will move it to a spot near a window in the basement for the winter so that it can get colder night temperatures.

As I often do in my flower photography, I played a lot with depth of field with these flower photographs. How shallow is too shallow? Can I have just a small portion of the flower in focus and the rest a soft blur? What happens if I set the aperture to its highest level (a small opening creating more detail)? How would it look if I convert this photograph to monochrome?

While I write and edit photographs I look out my office window occasionally. Leaves are constantly drifting to the ground from the tree across the street. Some of the trees around us are already bare. Others are more slow in their undressing for winter. The birds are avidly eating at my bird feeders. As the weather cools they seem to eat more and more, preparing for winter’s frigid days to come.

The seasons turn and the trees know what to do to survive the winter ahead, withdrawing sugar from their leaves and storing it in their roots for the long winter ahead. Dropping its leaves helps a tree conserve water and energy through the cold months of winter.

No Wrong Seasons

But every once in a while nature surprises us. Recently a woman I know posted a photo of her lilac tree which had sent out a single cluster of blossoms in late September. I am reminded of a line from one of Mary Oliver’s poems, “For some things there are no wrong seasons.”

Hurricane

It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

I want to embrace the idea of no wrong seasons in my life too. Though the seasons of my life are turning towards winter, I am nourishing an eternal springtime in my heart. I do this by choosing joy, practicing gratitude, and loving what is each day.

May you walk in beauty.