Flowers! Everyone loves flowers. They give me great pleasure and I photograph them year-round. In the cold New England winters, I buy flowers at the market to brighten the drab days and just use the window light. My dining room is painted red, and I have two windows facing west and one that faces south, so the lighting is ever-changing and often inspiring. My camera and 80mm macro lens live on the side table in the dining room, along with the tripod and reflectors.
All the images in this article are shot hand-held on the Fujinon XF80mmF2.8 macro lens. Many of the images are cropped to 4×3, which is the standard size of canvases used by painters. The others are 2×3 and are not cropped at all. I take time to make my compositions perfect when I shoot, as I don’t want to waste any pixels. The idea of ‘shoot loose’ so you can crop later can lead to laziness in making the image ‘right’ at the time of creation.
During COVID, when all my commercial work and workshops were cancelled, I made over 20,000 images of flowers. Keep in mind that as a Fujifilm X-Photographer, I would shoot many of the setups in all film simulations and use a variety of lighting setups. Sometimes I could come downstairs and pass through the dining room to the kitchen. The light would capture my attention and I would start shooting, occasionally for an hour or two before I even had coffee. I worked on several projects simultaneously: super close-ups shot wide open, flower buds to flowers dying to remnants of dried petals on the table. I was particularly interested in paying homage to artists who painted flowers: Van Gogh, O’Keefe, Mondrian, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne and Bosschaert. This started a shopping spree to find background materials and tablecloths that matched some of the paintings, and a variety of vases either borrowed from friends or purchased from the thrift stores. Although I shot mostly in natural light, I also shot with strobes when I wanted to achieve a certain look or feeling. I was obsessed. Still am…
This is an excerpt from an article by Bobbi Lane in issue 100 of FUJILOVE MAGAZINE (July 2024). Subscribers, you can find this article by downloading this issue from your subscriber area.
You will find the remaining part of this article in FUJILOVE MAGAZINE.
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