A study on Fritillaria photography

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams

I've really been working on my photography lately, I get home from work and have time to get a few things done in the home garden before the light starts to get just right. I've hardly been using the lightbox I bought a few years ago anymore. It seems that the the filtered effect of the greenhouse with the setting sun and some forward light from a simple spectrum adjustable LED mounted on a tripod is doing the trick for me. I don't have the fanciest equipment but I've learned to make due with what I have. I doubt very much Ansel would have approved of the use of f stops down in towards f4 and below, but it's working to capture the flowers as I see them every day. Sometimes highlighting a little detail with some reflected light is good, sometimes getting that backlight through the tepals really shows the color. I keep experimenting and trying new things and sometimes things work out! I'm no expert, but if anyone is interested I could put together a talk on plant photography. I've figured a few things out that might help the everyday person make the photo's they see in reality something they can transfer to the page. Below are a few Fritillaria I captured this evening with some brief bio's. I think the images turned out well. 

Fritillaria acmopetala Dark form
First collected by the Swiss botanist and mathematician Pierre Edmond Boissier, who happened to be the first person to describe Acantholimon. It was described in 1846 and introduced into cultivation in the 1870's. Hailing from Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. I would almost call this one of the weedy ones, since it tends to seed around in the greenhouse and I find I have to rogue it out of other specimen pots. It's charmer for sure, and such a performer I'm not sure how it hasn't found it's way into the cut flower industry at this point. 

Fritillaria amana
This one was growing in mixed company of a pond planter with the label 'Yellow Form', Indeed many in the pot are the yellow form, but this one was a particular standout with it's gold margins, and dusky almost glaucus shouldered bells. From Turky''s Amanus mountains, I'm sure I've covered the species extensively in this blog before. But it's always nice to discover a new form and think about the clonal potential. 

Fritillaria gussichiae

This is the first year this one has bloomed for me, from a Vlastimil Pilous seed collection in Sadanski, Bulgaria in 2017. I have high hopes for this one as the region seems a bit similar to our own Oregon Climate, although a bit warmer and a bit less rainfall on the average. It's a quick one to mature, putting on an impressive stalk of flowers after only 4 years from sowing. 

A nice little crop of photogenic Fritillaria for a Monday evening. Again, I'm no expert, but I would be happy to come to your garden club/society etc, and share some photo's of a wonderful array of Fritillaria and other unusual flower bulbs and discuss photography tips for capturing dramatic plant photo's. 

Sunny afternoons after crisp mornings, I buttoned up the African collection after seeing 28 in the overnight forecast. 

Cheers, 

Mark

 

A New Hope

 This is an important day in US history, the end of the evil reign and the beginning of a new hope. 

I certainly echo the sentiments Mark Twain wrote about Lincoln so long ago:

“This man, in whose heart knowledge and charity had left no room for malice, was marked by Providence as the one to “bind up the Nation’s wounds.”

And now back to the flowers, as I said, I hope to be done with politics for bit, to be able to trust that the elected leader has my safety, interests and freedoms in mind instead of  their own self interest and monetization of the position as that would be a very welcome change and I can get back to not worrying about what damage will be done for future generations like my daughter to sort out, and trust that the leader of the "free" world is in that job to make this world a better place. 

The Warner Mountains

Speaking of distractions, I had a fun trip to the Warner Mountains this past weekend, searching for some backcountry skiing adventure. Didn't find too much snow but had a great time with a special person and had fun taking some pictures of the scenic desolation and soaking in some wonderful hotsprings. Looking forward to going back to explore the wildflower situation soon. 

And now for real, back to the flowers. I wanted to start this year off talking a bit about photography. I'm trying to get better at the art form and since I have so many great subjects to play with I'm having a lot of fun experimenting and self learning in the process. 

So a bit about lighting and how it can change the appearance of a flower. The following pictures are the same plant, both taken last night as the sun was setting. This is Iris reticulata J.S. Dijt. on the greenhouse bench. My greenhouse is oriented North/South so the setting sun plays across the bench and backlights subjects with the greenhouse film providing a nice diffuse light that often will change colors with the setting of the sun. So this time of year I hurry home from work to see if I can catch the last rays of sun and take advantage of that backlight effect. 

What is different about these two photo's is that the one on the bottom has supplemental light provided by an adjustable spectrum LED that I keep on a tripod. This really helps with getting rid of shadows and dark spots on small intricate flowers, but a caveat remains. Clearly you can see the color change in the photo's below:

Iris J.S. Dijt no added light

Iris J.S. Dijt with added light toward the warm end of the spectrum

Keep in mind that neither of these photo's have any color corrections or filters added, I simply held up the LED light a few feet above the plant in the photo on the bottom. Both the camera settings were the same, ISO 200, F/4.0 and a 2 second exposure in the fading light with the camera obviously on a tripod. Both photo's were then uploaded without any editing at all. 

I'm pointing this out because having looked through so many photo's of plants in my day, and falling in love with some plant, I eventually got that plant or seed of it and grew it and found sometimes it doesn't look quite like the picture's I have seen. Knowing you can do a lot with photoshop to change the appearance of a plant is one end of that manipulation scale. But as the photo's above point out, simply the light in a given situation can pretty dramatically change the appearance of a plant. That can change with the conditions of the cloud cover in a given day or with adding supplemental light as I did in the photo's above. While it is sometimes fun to edit photo's to create a masterpiece, sometimes the photo doesn't end up looking at all like the one you took a photo of. Just google Iris J.S. Dijt and you'll see hundreds of photo's of it looking blue and hundreds of photo's of it looking purple. Just depends on what the color temperature was the day the picture was taken. 

Crocus versicolor

A crocus that survived the onslaught of the hungry and devastating vole invasion into the greenhouse is coming into bloom now. 

Finally winter has returned in the evenings but is gone by mid day as we have had temps into the 20's overnight but warm afternoons with lot's of sunshine and temps into the high 50's. Certainly is pushing some of the growth along at a more advanced rate then I would like for the middle of January and knowing that the coldest temps of the year could still be ahead of us. 

Mark