This photo was a bit of an experiment. I’m not sure if it worked, and I’m not sure what to even think about it from a purely aesthetic or artistic perspective, but it certainly is a bit different for me and a fun photo to try. Basically, I was wondering what would happen if I shot some small plants (flowers? weeds? I have no idea, but they’re just a couple inches tall and if you have any idea what they are I’d love to know.) in my neighbor’s yard with, shall we say, an extreme degree of backlighting. While last week’s photo, which was taken in roughly the same location, used backlighting to enhance the subject and create a sense of vibrant energy that was missing in photos of a flower alone, the sun-drenched background in this image overpowers the subjects altogether. It’s downright obtrusive and even feels oppressive, as if a celestial potentiometer needs to be dialed back a tick or two.
But then, that effect was kind of the point here. I can’t recall taking a picture like this before and wanted to give it a chance or, at the very least, just experiment with something new. I lowered my Nikon D750 so that it was almost resting on the ground, flipped out the rear screen, enabled the live view, and started shooting. I tried some larger apertures but eventually, in a move that will likely surprise nobody who has been following along lately, I ended up at my go-to aperture of f/11 which allowed not one, but two, of these green protrusions to be pretty well focused. I moved my camera to get them kind of along the two vertical thirds dividers, though that’s a bit charitable to the one on the right side. What really stood out to me were the edges of each plant, glowing with so much backlight that they almost appeared to be electrified. I didn’t have too much in mind for the foreground and background, but I was pretty sure that it would look interesting simply because of the vastly different kind of photo I had in mind.
In the end I think this worked out quite well, if nothing else just because it’s different from what I normally shoot. The backlighting is so extreme that the greens are nearly black and the entire image feels monochromatic as a result. Instead of one clearly easily-discernible subject right in the center of the frame there is a morass of shapes poking up from the bottom, all in different states of focus. And an entire section of the frame is so bright it’s probably clipped, with no data to recover even if I wanted to. In other words, from a technical standpoint this photo is probably not great. But from an artistic, creative, and purely Weekly Fifty standpoint, it’s a winner :)
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