Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens...and other lenses too.

A couple of weeks ago I shared an image of an Indian Paintbrush flower (also called Prairie Fire, among many other names) that kind of continued an unspoken tradition I have had here on Weekly Fifty, which is to share similar shots such as that one each Spring when these flowers pepper the yards and fields and countrysides of Oklahoma. The image wasn’t anything extraordinarily special but it was worth posting, in that I enjoyed the experience of taking the picture and learned a few things from it as well. Or at least continued learning a few things, since I feel like I still have a long way to go when it comes to flower photographs, but every little bit helps, eh? Not long after I shot the other one I took the picture you see here, which is kind of an evolution of the original and, in my opinion, a much better shot due to a couple of important compositional elements. Basically, I learned a few things with the picture I posted at the end of May, and then I got the chance to use them on the shot you see today :)

To start with, this flower feels alive, vibrant, and colorful in a way that leaves its counterpart seem flat and uninteresting by comparison. The backlighting not only makes the red petals practically pop out of the frame, creates compelling accents on the dozens of white flowers behind and in front of it too. I like how the flower is slightly off-center, which gives the shot some room to breathe and allows for the top-right corner to be dominated by some very dark greens as well as some spots of white light as the sun shows through the trees. Finally, the foreground elements create a sense of depth and three-dimensionality (is that even a word?) that’s missing on the other shot.

It’s important to note that any of my above comparison analysis between this image and the other one should not be taken as criticisms of the earlier picture. One thing I stress over and over here on Weekly Fifty is that I try to approach photography as a continual learning process, and an ever-expanding continuum with no endpoint. Essentially, there’s always room to grow and new things to learn, and one of the best ways to do that is to examine earlier images and apply lessons to future photos. It doesn’t mean the earlier shots are bad, just that there’s always something to learn, new techniques to try, and ways to build skills from the foundations that came before. That’s my goal here, and I hope it’s your goal also. It’s like Andy Dufresne said to his friend Red: get busy living, or get busy dying. Except in this sense, just replace living with learning, grab your camera, and get to work :)

There’s something about this photo that keeps me coming back to it, and it’s only partially related to the subject. I mean, of course the single solitary prairie fire flower is what immediately catches your eye (well, mine anyway) but beyond that a couple of elements in the background just hook me and I’m curious what you think about them too. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s just start at the beginning. I shot this while I was in my neighbor’s field, the same place I took this shot about a week earlier. This time it was me, my wife, and our two kids who all went over to see the hundreds of butterflies that were floating throughout the field, landing on flowers for a few seconds to sip some nectar before lifting off into the air again. The four of us spent a while just walking around looking at everything and commenting on the sights, sounds, and smells of the field while I had shot a few pics with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. My goal was to get a photo of a single butterfly on a flower, but every time I approached one it would fly away before I got close enough to snap a picture. No matter though, it was time spent with family which means, in the end, it was time well spent.

I did, however, notice this single prairie fire flower standing tall all by itself in a small clearing of wild onion flowers and, seeing the brilliant backlight on the central stalk, I just knew I had to take its picture. The flower almost seems like it’s glowing, and has a sense of live and vibrance that really struck me. I got down low to the ground, adjusted the aperture of my lens to f/4.8, and started taking pictures. I got what I was looking for, and really appreciated the billowing clouds of light in the background as well as the white wild onion flowers on the edges of the frame, but what really hit me when I was looking through the shots in Lightroom was the way some of the flowers in the background almost seemed like duplicates of each other. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s super cool to see :)

For example, if you look to the left of the subject about halfway to the edge of the frame you’ll see a green flower stem that looks…well, it almost looks like a ghost. It’s one single stem that looks like two, and it’s almost certainly due to some kind of refracting properties within the camera lens. Once you see it you’ll notice other areas of the frame where similar things happen, and it’s like nothing I have ever encountered in one of my images before. I don’t know what happened and I don’t know how to replicate it…all I do know is that I like it and it elevated this image well beyond anything I could have planned.

I’ve been going back and forth about what to do with this image for a while. On one hand, it’s about 70% of what I wanted it to be and when I look at the shot I just can’t help but think about how I would do it differently if I had the opportunity. It’s the one that got away, so to speak, and there’s a dozen things I would change if I could revisit the complete composition. But on the other hand, there’s a lot I really like and instead of focusing on what didn’t work, I want to think about what did work and use the rest as a learning opportunity.

At the end of the day, the main issue I have with this photo has nothing to do with anything related to composition, framing, or lighting. Rather, it’s my own lack of foresight by not shooting in RAW. I took this photo with my Fuji X100F which I can always count on to produce beautiful JPEG files that hardly need any editing at all except for maybe a bit of exposure adjustment here and there. When I set up this shot I forgot to put the camera in RAW mode, which meant I had far less editing headroom compared to a JPEG image. In that sense I did a disservice to the subject; it’s a beautiful flower that was given to my wife for a very specific purpose, and perhaps I could have done better if I had taken care to get my exposure right in the first place. To wit: the original is not great.

Alrightey then, let’s not dwell too much on what went wrong. Let’s talk instead about what’s going on in this shot (the actual one, not the original you see above) and what worked well. First of all, the flower itself is quite stunning and, being my first experience with an orchid, pretty fascinating too. When it was given to my wife as a gift several months ago its flowers were blooming nicely, and as time went by they only got more stunning. The brilliant white petals persisted, neither fading nor withering, quite unlike most any other flower I had ever seen. One day my wife remarked at how striking it looked when backlit as the sun rose each morning, and it got me thinking about how I might capture some of that essence but in a more controlled manner at night with some artificial lighting.

I set several of my Nanlite Pavotubes outside on tripods, dialed in to different colors, and then went inside with my Fuji X100F and took several shots. I experimented with different color combinations and brightness levels, and ended up with what you see above. The original, that is–not the edited version at the very top. I do think the overall concept here is sound, and the colored lighting worked well, but I just keep kicking myself for not shooting in RAW. I shouldn’t let it bother me too much though, and instead treat it like I do many of my Weekly Fifty photos: as a learning opportunity. And who knows, if the orchid blooms again I might give this another try :)

Just outside one of the main buildings on the Oklahoma State University campus is a row of Genti White Clustered Bellflowers which, for most of the year, are large, stately, and decidedly green—or brown, depending on what season. But for a brief period of time each spring they come to life with blinding brilliance, a curtain of white that shines so brightly in the midday sun it almost hurts to look at them. My wife, who is a faculty member at OSU, remarks on them each year as she goes from one building to the next between classes. When the two of us met up one morning to go for a short walk she mentioned to me that these white flowers were blooming, so later that day I grabbed my camera and went to see if I could capture a shot of them.

The most challenging part of creating this image was deciding how to adequately convey the sheer sense of scale on display, and I’m not sure how well I did it. These flowers bloom high above the heads of the college students passing by, stretch on for the entire length of the building. I could have stood way back and took a picture of the entire scene, but that wouldn’t have been, in my opinion, nearly as impactful as what you see here. I would have been just a fairly normal scene of a brick building with some white flowering bushes in front, and students walking by. I don’t think, though I could be wrong, it would have done a great job of conveying a sense of scale.

What I chose to do instead was focus on a single protruding collection of the tiny white flowers and use that as the main subject of the image, but compose the shot in such a way that several other flowers were visible in the background, while also positioning myself so that a few were also showing in the foreground. The result, at least in my opinion, does a pretty decent job of illustrating the scene without showing a whole lot. I’m not sure if it worked exactly how I had hoped, but it did present a fun challenge and I’m glad my wife mentioned it to me and encouraged me to give it a try :)

I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a tradition per se, but every Spring when these prairie fire flowers bloom around town I relish the opportunity to capture their beauty with my camera. Often these shots end up on Weekly Fifty, and longtime readers will no doubt have seen similar scenes as this one shared here on the blog, but my enjoyment at taking shots like this is in no way lessened by the frequency, or perhaps regularity, with which I take them. To this day my favorite flower photo I have ever taken is that of a monarch butterfly resting on one of these prairie fires just as the sun is coming up on the morning after a nice spring rain. I’m still not sure how I was able to get that, but in a lot of ways I have been chasing it ever since.

This one is not it :) But it is, nonetheless, still a fun type of image to create and one that I continue to learn from as I grow in my photography journey. I shot this in my neighbor Dave’s field, with his permission of course, one evening while the sun was slowly descending in the western sky. I had really hoped to go capture a shot in the morning after a rainstorm, but the one thing you really need for that to happen is, as you might have guessed, rain. And that has been, sadly, in short supply in Oklahoma lately. As you can see from the withered petals on the stalk, this flower and its peers were not going to be around for too terribly much longer so, rain or no, I knew my time was limited. And let’s be honest, these flowers are beautiful no matter what the weather conditions happen to be.

I shot this with my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens at f/16 and positioned fairly close to the subject. I couldn’t go much wider than f/16 since I wanted as much of the flower to be in focus as possible, but one thing I could easily control was the overall composition–specifically the horizon. Did I want to show just the field, or the line of trees behind it? I took dozens of images from low, medium, and high angles and ended up preferring this one over the rest because it shows more of a sense of place and scale. You get the idea that this flower is in the middle of a large field, and that there’s something (trees? bushes?) off in the distance; the other shots without that dark green line just weren’t as interesting to look at. I also positioned myself such that the sunlight was coming from behind the subject which added a nice glow to the topmost petals.

Who knows…maybe we’ll get some rain and I’ll get to go out again and take some photos, but even if not I’m happy with what I got. And that’s a lot :)