As promised in the previous entry: the first photo with my new camera. Photos of plants and flowers I can make in our own garden--thanks to my wife's green fingers. And thanks to nature's whims, because I don't think that the highly decorative thistle in this picture was intended to be there. Never mind; it
is there.
Is this not a picture that might appeal to
Imogen Cunningham? Her modernist flower and plant photo's of the 1920s are among the best in almost two centuries of plant photography that I know! I hope that the Trust won't mind my reproduing a little example of her most classical magnolia flower photo. Looking at that example, I guess that she might have tried to come closer than I did: there are three main buds in my picture and she would have chosen a single one, but I liked not only the variegated leaves, together with the composition of a minor "strong point" in the upper left and the major point of attention on the right.
As for the technicalities: the picture was made with the camera + macro lens on a tripod in natural, diffuse light. Postprocessing was just a few minutes of Lightrooming. I converted to black-and-white, reduced the greens and surrounding colours (and for good measure increasedg the reds and magentas, though I did not see much of a change doing that), and finally I increased the contrast with the tone curve, to ensure some deep blacks and then have the full range till almost pure white.
Really irresistible, this spring: temperatures are much above normal since some time and all plants and flowers are just exploding! After a day of hard work in the garden, the magnolia tree looked gorgeous in the sunset. Even better is the purity of a single magnolia flower in close-up. But a snapshot like mine is far from the perfect photo Imogen Cunningham once made of a magnolia--I swhowed her photo a long time ago already.
Still, I'm not dissatisfied with this snapshot, the more so as it was taken with the 'second camera', the Panasonix Lumix TZ5, and without a tripod. Not bad at all, this little compact camera! But that's something I said before, too ;-)
