My neighbors across the street own two acres of land, and each year they let about half of their property grow untouched, unmowed, and undisturbed. This simple action, or lack of action, results in a host of flowers, along with tall grass and a great deal of wildlife, taking over the north portion of their yard for a few months. It’s a beautiful sight, and with their permission it also becomes one of my favorite spots to take photos. I particularly enjoy walking around the area in the evening as the sun fades in the distance, camera in hand, to see what photos I can get. Even though I don’t know much about flowers or most things that grow in the ground, I do know a bit about lighting, composition, and photography in general and my neighbor’s yard in the evening is a great place to practice–and hopefully get a few good shots while I’m at it.
Over the years I’ve gotten many photos like this one below, which aren’t super difficult but can still be fun and rewarding.
I shot that a few minutes before I got the actual image I’m featuring this week: all you need to get a photo like it is find a flower, position yourself so that the sun is behind it, dial in your aperture (in this case, f/11), and click the shutter. Bam. Easy, simple, and fun. Nothing wrong with this kind of image at all. But after I shot it I had a sense that I could do better. So I kept walking until I saw another similar flower but with a bit different lighting, and that made all the difference.
Normally when my subjects are backlit I don’t like to actually show the light. Instead I prefer to just show the effects of the subject being lit from behind, such as a glow around the edges and a bit of a sparkle here and there, which you can see in the second image. But in the photo at top you can actually see the sunlight breaking through the trees which makes everything seem significantly more alive, dynamic, and three-dimensional. Instead of a simple flower against a dark background, it’s a flower stretching, almost yearning, for the sunlight which is breaking through the trees like a physical presence in the frame. I underexposed the shot by a bit (Maybe one stop? I forget exactly.) so as to not blow out the highlights, and was left with plenty of data in the shadows that I could lighten to get the light purple to shine through. It was a fantastically enjoyable experiment and I’m glad I kept at it, looking for a new way to photograph a rather mundane subject in a normal everyday setting. There’s a sense of kinetic energy in this photo even though nothing is moving at all, and it gives me some ideas to think about how I might expand my photography beyond the familiar and into new frontiers.
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