For a special project, I started with a high-key photo of poppies and bellflowers (Papaver and Campanula). I created the background by scanning and digitally combining two pieces of papyrus and a sheet of rice paper (Ohiri).

I’d been searched around for some bright red Greek poppies to photograph, and over the weekend we went to Annie’s Annuals & Perennials in Richmond to see if we could find some. Annie’s is reclaimed from industrial wasteland and a great plant nursery for bringing the kids, with aisles and aisles of plants both rare and common, and push toys and vehicles for the young ones. Still, it was hard to concentrate on horticulture with my four loudly colliding into each other and hurtling this way and that.

Alas, Poppy planting season has for the most part passed, and there were no Greek poppy plants to be had. Some of these wonderful red poppies were growing in a large pot, however. With permission kindly granted by Annie’s staff, I clipped them and then we quickly hurried home so I could photograph them on my light box.

The Gloriosa Lily is the national flower of Zimbabwe. It is also highly toxic. The poison in the flower is colcichine, in small doses used as a medicine for gout sufferers. But one of these flowers ground up and added to (let’s say) a communal fruit smoothy would be enough to kill everyone in a fair-sized village.

With flowers as with femme fatales sometimes that which is most attractive is most dangerous.

I photographed this Gloriosa Lily by placing it on a mirror. The setup used black velvet cloth wrapped around and above the mirror to create a solid black platform and background.

If you follow my work, you probably have figured out that both this blog and my Flickr photostream reflect current projects. For example, if you see a great deal of landsape imagery, I am probably working on a landscape book.

Floral imagery such as the one in this story, Papaver and Iridaceae, White Iris, Floral Impressionismo, and Floral Abundance are likely to suggest that I am working on a project involving flower photography—as indeed I am, with a beautiful and informative book about flowers and flower photography expected in time for Christmas.

This is partly by way of blogger’s apology because I am having so much fun photographing flowers that my blogging time has eroded a bit lately. It’s fun developing new techniques for capturing flowers—an elusive, senuous and beautiful subject even when (as with the Matilija Poppies shown here) they are essentially growing wild on a strip between the sidewalk and a major thoroughfare.