A great deal of our energy lately has gone into clearing my parents’ house to make it ready for sale. This is a thankless task and emotionally very difficult. Fortunately, we are almost done. But every time I think we’ve removed everything the house disgorges something new—this time a collection of small glass bottles, cowering in a corner.

I used these bottles to anchor some flowers from my garden, photographed with my 85mm tilt-shift macro on a white seamless background.

Fantastic Iris © Harold Davis

White Camellia © Harold Davis

A single blossom from my garden is apparently the essence of simplicity. The power of these images of flower blossoms relies on this apparent simplicity: you are supposedly looking at the whole blossom and nothing but the blossom against a straight black background. 

To the casual glance, the only real photographic control involves lighting. Simple as these compositions seem to be, they do depend upon attractive overall lighting.

Sometimes the apparently simplest things are the hardest to pull off. It would be a mistake to underestimate the craft that goes into these straightforward compositions.

Related images: Frilly Goddesses; Topography of Camellia.

Camellia ‘Pearl Maxwell Blush’ © Harold Davis

Camellia ‘Elizabeth Weaver’ © Harold Davis

Ranunculus on Black © Harold Davis

My flowers are like frilly Goddesses. But not in a fey way, or an overly cute way. The textures these blossoms provide could almost be fabrics or garments. The beauty I see in my viewfinder makes my heart pause, and regard the world with gladness despite the sadness that lingers.

Above: Ranunculus, photographed on black velvet, Nikkor 85mm tilt-shift macro, six exposures at shutter speeds ranging from 1 second to 30 seconds; each exposure at f/64 (effective aperture) and ISO 64; mounted on tripod; exposures combined in Photoshop.

Below: Iris, photographed on a light box, Zeiss 50mm Macro, seven exposures at shutter speeds ranging from 1/15 of a second to 4 seconds; each exposure at f/22 and ISO 64; mounted on tripod; exposures combined in Photoshop.

Ranunculus © Harold Davis

Iris © Harold Davis

White Anemone © Harold Davis

Heading into a new year, I always like to look back through my photography of the waning year to see what I might have overlooked. Here are a few candidates in the “flower: close-ups” category. 

Best wishes to all for a great 2023!

Poppy in Pink © Harold Davis

All things must pass © Harold Davis

I photographed this Helichrysum bracteatum (strawflower) blossom on my light box (far below), then inverted the image in LAB Color, and converted to monochromatic (directly below).

I’m headed tomorrow to Maine to teach a workshop in Composition & Photography. I am looking forward very much to the week on mid-coast Maine at Maine Media Workshops, where I haven’t been since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 (webinars are great, but they don’t take the place of in-person workshops!).

Should you be feeling nostalgic for 2020 and the early pandemic, you can also check out Love in the Time of the Coronavirus on my blog.

Helichrysum bracteatum © Harold Davis

Helichrysum bracteatum on white © Harold Davis

It’s fun to use flowers to create animistic shapes on the light box, like good-luck dragons and this “Butter-flower” shown below.

Butterfly of Flowers © Harold Davis

As summer becomes full and the days of July rush by, the dahlias are in bloom. Each dalia is different, a unique world unto itself. Some of them remind me of deep sea creatures, strangely beached into the garden.

Do Flowers Come from the Sea? © Harold Davis

For me, the question with dahlias in their infinite variety and explosion of color is where to begin—and how can I ever stop photographing them?

Dahlia Daze © Harold Davis

Dahlias in a Tray © Harold Davis

Inversion: Do Flowers Come from the Sea? © Harold Davis

It seems there are many ways to create art with dahlias, starting with a photo (click here for a keyword search on my website). However you count the ways, I love them one and all! Dahlias have zest, and they give me zest for living.

In the pre-dawn cool I walked around the house and down to our dahlia bed in the side yard. There was one perfect white blossom. I cropped it, and placed it in a vase, ready for its turn as a star in front of my camera after breakfast. I tried the traditional poses, and laid it flat on the light box, but when all is said and done this somewhat unconventional side view of petals works best for me.

Perfect Dahlia Day © Harold Davis

Dahlias are, of course, a favorite flower of mine to photograph. Click here for more.

Phyllis brought a Phalaenopsis (“moth orchid”) home for a short visit to our sunny living room. Leaving the orchid in its decorative pot, I photographed the blossoms using a vertical light box setup (image below).

This genus of orchid was first brought to Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and collected by the Victorians. Today, it is widely sold for decorative purposes throughout the world because of its ease of propagation and cultivation. While the range of the genus in the wild includes Java and Australia, it probably originated in the Philippines (the tag on the Phalaenopsis that I photographed indicates that my specimen was grown in Salinas, California).

Orchid © Harold Davis

Next, I photographed a single flower up close and personal using my macro probe lens (below). Corn Poppy is another example of an image that uses this lens for a floral close-up.

The orchid close-up is actually a composite, with the lower half exposed using the ring light built into the lens, and the upper half exposed using ambient backlighting. With the camera firmly held in place on a sturdy tripod, the composition of the two images stayed the same despite the different lighting. I combined the two different images using a simple layer mask and gradient in Photoshop.

Phalaenopsis © Harold Davis

I cut a stalk of Campanulas (“Canterbury Bells”) from the garden. I laid the bunch gently on my light box for a sequence of high-key captures (below).

Campanula (Canterbury Bells) © Harold Davis

Often, photography of flowers on a light box destroys my models, and this makes me sad. However, in this case the Campanulas were completely intact following photography. So I placed them in a cut crystal vase, and brought them upstairs to enjoy.

It seemed to me that the flowers were pretty special in the vase, but how to capture them? The answer was to use two light boxes, arranged perpendicularly to each other—as in this Light Box Photography in Three Dimensions tutorial video (post-production for a three-dimensional light box image is shown in the follow-up video here).

My Campanulas in a Vase image is shown below following post-production.

Campanulas in a Vase © Harold Davis