January 2022 - Petals

I do like flowers. But I am getting slightly bored with standard photos of these things. The colours are nice, the shapes are nice, but I’ve simply seen too many nice pictures of a single flower, or a bunch of flowers, to grab my interest. Mind you, as Sean Connery was reputed to have said, ‘Never say Never’ before doing yet another Bond film, I do still take those photos, so long as I can see something different in the presentation.

There is in fact a lot of detail in a flower that can lead to nice patterns and shapes – helped by the colours. In this picture, I have taken an orange rose that we had in the house and photographed it with a macro lens from the side. I wanted to show the way that the petals curl and touch – almost a sensuous image (heaven forbid!); and I think it’s succeeded.

The bits of dark background at the edges are important to give a sense of containment to the picture; I could certainly have cropped it in to get rid of them but, in my view, it would take away a lot of the power from the picture. 

Again, this is something anyone can try – you don’t need a specialist lens or camera, a smartphone is usually plenty good enough. And the result is something that is different from most flower pictures.