Flowers In a New Light

While most people know me for my alien creations, I’ve also enjoyed creating several series of flower images. In the past, I’ve explored every method I could imagine for creating a new perspectives on flower photography including photographing dead flowers, baked flowers, dissected flowers, flowers with fantastical, added appendages, and even fried flowers. 

After several years of creating my crazy alien creatures, “Sunshiny Day” marked a return to capturing flower images. The basic idea for this body of work was that the flowers and any greenery should allude to the idea that my subjects were communicating with each other in some way. My aim was to have the viewer see and, even better, feel a relationship between the elements in each image contained within this series of flower photographs.

To me, it was important that the flowers told a story in how they are interacting. It’s a bit like when we anthropomorphize animals, giving them human attributes such as the ability to talk or have human reactions (think about the work of Beatrix Potter, for instance). I wanted my flowers to “talk”to each other, too, but, unlike a child’s fairy tale, to do so without words.

In “Sunshiny Day”, I used a Gerber daisy because of its bold coloration and its perfect symmetry. In contrast, I added this uncultivated vine, collected from the edge of my yard. The vine represents the various stages of the growth. It was a happy accident to find a leaf with the small, parasitic orbs attached to a leaf among my collected vines.

Arranged together this way, we see all the stages of growth from just the promise of new life within those orbs clinging onto the leaf, to the new unfolding leaves, and going all the way through to the mature Gerber daisy in full, ecstatic, sunny bloom. To me, the image represents the joy that can be found in all the stages of life up to maturity and it almost feels like these elements are dancing together because of the graceful rhythms and curves of the vine.

I photographed the vine and daisy on a light table upon which I had placed a translucent, ribbed piece of plastic shelf liner. I thought the added texture with those diagonal lines was very interesting and I wanted to experiment with it. I used a basic video light (purchased ages ago) as my main light source. I set up two pieces of white foam core, arranged in a triangular shape around the back corner of my light table, as reflectors for some nice fill light.

The image was captured with my Olympus E-M1X, equipped with an Olympus M 40-150 mm zoom lens at 40 MM. The exposure was .5 second at F/22, and an IOS of 200 and I had the camera on a tripod. It was far more challenging than I anticipated to get some nice direction of light on the flower while avoiding unwanted and disruptive shadows from the ribbing of the shelf liner. A fair amount of Photoshopping was involved in cleaning up the image for competition.

The image is part of a larger series of flower relationship images, and include two albums which were entered into PPA competition, both in black and white, and several other stand-alone images which were all part of this flower series, a few which I’ve included below and a few more can be seen on my website: https://ellaputneycarlson.com. Color was integral to the feeling I wanted to evoke with this image, but most of the other images are presented in black and white.