2025 Bulbs, Part 1 - or - color in gray

 I'm doing flower posts out of order here, as April 19 was the last day I went out specifically to do spring bloom work this year. Unfortunately for the drama of the photos, none of the days I had time to do sessions at the gardens featured anything other than uniform overcast. Fortunately, fast glass and bright colors can do a lot of heavy lifting on their own, and I've also gotten to be much handier with managing curves and color balance to add a little extra pop if the image calls for it.

I used full-frame this walk, and few kits on a nice day are more rewarding to do flower work with than the FA Limited lenses. The three frames I selected for this post are all through the 77. When I shoot flower portraiture like this, the 77 has always done a fantastic job painting the scene. I had concerns when I got a full-frame digital camera that the wider field of view would create a problem for me, as I had only ever shot the lens on APS-C where it's about equivalent to 115mm, but practice in this field and a little experience doing portraiture sessions have made me more comfortable with the native field of view of this lens.

These tulips were planted at the Brookside Gardens fragrance garden area this year. All of the hexagonal beds featured these three colors, with maybe a less uniform distribution than I remember them doing from years past. There were fewer people enjoying them this year, too, but I think that's because it was gray, and my experience is that only the die hard gardenfan will spend time outside peeping on days that aren't full-sun and warm. One can make an argument that 80 might be too warm for a mid-April day, but it certainly wasn't an obstacle for me.

A new favorite thing from this year was magnolia flowers that were bloomed in such a way - usually via missing a petal - that you can see the stamens and carpels through a window in the petals. This saucer magnolia was doing a great job of that, and with the distance I had between the flower and where I could stand outside the bed beneath it, I was able to throw another flower out of focus in front of it. I remember reading someone once say that under no circumstances should you ever have anything out of focus in front of your subject... I can't imagine leaving an entire set of layers out of your compositional toolkit just because you think your viewers are too dumb to handle it, though.

Magnolias, at least saucer, star, and sweetbay, represent an interesting challenge generally thanks to their tendencies to flower too high to effectively photograph like this. In a way, that's one of the nice things about the distance created by a flowerbed you're not allowed to walk in. I have my limits, since the most reach I have native full-frame is 135mm, but I suppose if I know I want to do this in advance, I just take APS-C gear instead.

Another "huh" about this selection of shots is that all of them are subject-right. I will do that a lot with picking candidates for share. I suppose this is because I get biased to one side of the screen or another by my first few good shots, but who knows for sure. Maybe it's because I'm right-handed?

This narcissus bed was closer to the conservatories. As you can see in the lower left, it was pretty late for some of these, but the open flowers from that morning or the day before were striking. If I had this shot to do over again, I'd stand up a little bit and try to get the clump in the background more in line between the foreground and secondary flowers - or it's possible this ended up like this because there was a fencepost or sign to the left. I do try to shoot around the obstacles in the gardens, and sometimes it forces slightly weird views.

One thing missing from this frame that I know I've seen in other shots of narcissus flowers is an ant. It's a pretty common experience to come home from a garden session and find at least a couple of shots like this will contain ants on the flowers. I don't usually think of ants as pollinators, but they're there, dutifully shuffling probably nectar around. 

The final observation I'll provide here is that I do need to be a bit better about my editing practice from days like this. Most days, I will use shadow and highlight controls to expand my images' histograms to fill the full range of brightnesses. Doing that will give your images a lot of pop, but they become in a sense dishonest, featuring shadows that weren't there on the day. I'm not against extreme editing practices categorically, but for my own work, a subtle pushing of the boundaries is what I generally want to aim for. I might have to do an A/B demonstration at some point, but leaving the darkest pixels of the image off the 0 floor is a big benefit when processing this type of image.