I can't resist...

( the haiku machine. )

Photographing flowers in their habitats

Nature photographers treat flowers as gems. And they are. Their beauty is irresistible. Why are they so appealing? I have reflected on this question in writing before. They have evolved to be attractive. It isn't our eyes in particular that the plant wants to catch, but eyes nonetheless. It uses an appealing combination of colour, form and fragrance to seduce pollinators. Flowers aren't the only notable organisms that do this. Birds and butterflies, for example, also use colour and form to attract sexual attention. People enjoy the side-benefits, and photographers are drawn to these subjects endlessly.





I enjoy them as much as the next person, but as an ecologist I am particularly intrigued by the way these organisms exist in their habitats. Nature photography often fails to see the forest for the trees, or in this case the forest for the flowers. If I isolate them all the time, am I showing them for what they really are: an organism dependant on a complex network of other living and inorganic elements for its survival? My camera, through its own deficiency, helped draw my attention to this. Offering me little control over exposure, focus or depth of field, it rarely captures the fine details of a flower's beauty. For example bright white and yellow flowers are usually overexposed, and the focus mechanism has difficulty with reds. But occasionally, when I find creative ways of including the foreground in a wider landscape, the camera's vision amazes me.

Example 1. Example 2.

These photos present different problems than close-up shots. Artistic composition is a challenge. That's why I had so much trouble photographing the leatherwood flowers yesterday. If I couldn't isolate them from the complexity of their environment, they were hard to see. The image I posted in texture has no focal point. Besides, taking a snail's eye point of view can be uncomfortable or impossible. In the case of the image above, holding the camera at ground level prevented me from seeing its view screen, so a lot of guesswork was involved.

Images that manage to include the surroundings tell more of a story. The photo of bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) in an otherwise bare forest, shows something about the plant that a close-up would miss. And see the new seedlings clustering around the stems of the parent plants? While I have no intention of abandoning my efforts at simpler photographs of flowers, I set myself a project of concentrating on more complex ones.

This is an experiment. It starts here with Sanguinaria, one of the first Ontario widlflowers to bloom in spring.

Reading meme

Oh alright, just because I'm avoiding washing the dishes. From stealthpup

( Cut the list, bold the ones you've read, add three more favourites,and post )