Poppy Revealed, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

The luminous effect in these photos is reasonably easy to achieve—and has nothing to do with Photoshop. It is a pure photographic effect, achieved using good old-fashioned photographic tools and an understanding of the key elements of exposure.

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It’s one way to enjoy macro flower photography on a windy day. You need flowers with contrasting colors in motion. The idea is to focus on one of the contrasting flowers. Ideally, the in-focus flower will be relatively still. The other flower will be out of focus, and is often postioned in front of the “sharper” flower. The out-of-focus flower should be blowing in the wind.

Use a tripod. Set the shutter speed/aperture pairing so that the relatively stiller flower that is in-focus will be rendered fairly literally, while the foreground out-of-focus flowers that are waving madly in the breeze become a luminous blur.

As you might expect, this technique takes a great deal of trial and error, and usually a whole bunch of lousy photos for each good one.

This is the technique I used to photograph this California poppy a while back:

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Day Lily 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

OK, so I’ve “borrowed” Michael Pollan’s excellent title for this story. These photos are of day lilies. The subject is mostly the stamens, or male sexual organs, of each flower. The stamen consists of the anthers at the top of a delicate stalk, and the stalk itself, called a “filament.” The anthers host the pollen, used for fertilization.

Each flower has several stamen, but only one pistil (the female sexual organ). The stalk of the pistil, which you can see in these photos although it is not really the subject of the photos, is called a “style.” In these pictures, you can’t really see the “stigma” (at the top end of the style), or the ovary at the base of the pistil. We tend to think of the ovary in non-botannical terms as the flower’s “bud.”

In the photo above, stamen cluster around the single pistil (really, the style belonging to the pistil). You are looking down into the ovary. In contrast, in the photograph below, a group of stamen are standing upright, anthers waving in the breeze. The stamens are grouped around a single style, which is perpendicular to the stamens. The style is part of a pistil with stigma to the left (out of the photo), and comes out of an ovary to the right (also not visible).

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These day lilies grow along the little side path right outside our kitchen door. I photographed them sitting on the stone flagstones we’ve used to pave the area. I have a new macro lens, a Sigma f/2.8 50mm. This is a fairly inexpensive macro lens, and it seems pretty sharp. When I add an extension tube to it, and get real close to the subject (like I did with these photos, poking my lens right into the flower), I can get really crisp magnifications. These photos were routinely processed with no special gimmicks in Photoshop.

Of course, the photos are not about botany, the sexual parts of flowers, my kitchen path, or the lens I used. They are about color, lines, and grace.

Orange Rose, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

It’s the details that make this photo for me (you may have to view it larger to see them). For example, the insect hanging upside down at the top, and the water drop with three bubbles inside it at the bottom.