Ok, so at this point Weekly Fifty might as well be called “Weekly Flower” because that’s pretty much all I’ve been posting lately. But to be fair, it’s also about all I’ve been photographing lately (not counting shots of people, like my wife and kids, which I don’t post online) so at least you know I come by it honestly :) I took this picture in my neighbor’s field not too far from many of the other flower photos I have shared here over the past month or so, but this one contains a key element that was missing from the others: condensation. Or perhaps precipitation, to put a fine point on it. I took this the morning after we got some pretty big thunderstorms in the area, and even though it only resulted in about an inch of rain in total where we live this field was still plenty wet the next day when the sun came up. It was still cloudy and pretty overcast after my family and I got home from church, so I grabbed my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens and walked across the street to Dave’s field to see if I could get a few shots. I didn’t have anything in mind per se, but it’s really fun to take pictures after a good spring rain–especially if your subjects are full of life and color like what you see here.
There’s two elements of this shot that really stand out to me, one of which I kind of caused to happen and the other which I was simply fortunate to be able to capture with my camera. The first, which I was more or less responsible for, is the way the subject almost duplicates the background objects. Not copies, exactly, but perhaps echoes. I didn’t move or alter the scene at all to make this happen, but I did position myself intentionally such that the flowers in the foreground were on the right and pointing upwards in a V-shape, and their counterparts a bit farther back were on the left side of the frame. In fact, on a really basic level, this image demonstrates the power of that age-old compositional device called “The rule of thirds.” It’s one of the first thing a new photographer learns, and with good reason: you can’t really go wrong with it. Sure there are lots of creative ways to compose an image but if you’re not really sure what to do, just bust out the good ol’ rule of thirds and you’re all set.
The other thing I didn’t really plan was the giant drops of water visible on the pink petals of the flower in the foreground. I mean, I did intentionally take this picture after it rained but I did not plan it such that there would be water on this particular flower. I didn’t even think of it while I was shooting the picture, and only noticed these drops after I was back on my computer going through the images in Lightroom. I like the added context and texture they give to the flower and, really, the entire image as a whole. Those two drops, despite being relatively small, serve to elevate the photo well beyond what it would be without them and are a good reminder of how much the subtle details matter when taking pictures.
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