flora fotografica

Spring came early this year to the Pacific Northwest. The “Pineapple Express” that plagued our ski hills this winter blessed us with an early and protracted spring. While my allergies may say otherwise, I love the flowers that this unusually warm weather has brought us.

Pretty much every spring I break out my macro lens and begin a new series of flower images recording what is new each week. It has almost become a ritual to mark an official end to Winter hibernation. It’s like warm weather brings renewal of the earth and to my photographic yearnings. This year, however, things were a little different. Over the course of the past year and a half I have been investing in a new camera system for travel. I loved my old Nikon gear but I couldn’t handle the weight of it anymore. Every trip I was looking for an excuse to pare down the equipment to a lighter more manageable kit. My solution, like many other photographers out there, was to purchase into the Fuji Mirrorless system. I hadn’t used it much for still life, and certainly not for any macro work, until recently. A few weeks ago I picked up a converter ring to attache my Nikon lenses to the Fuji and now I have the ability to use my amazing Nikon macro glass on my equally amazing Fuji bodies. It’s a Win/Win situation.

As I was composing these images over the past couple of weeks my mind kept drifting back to an exhibit I once saw at the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled “flora fotografica”. The show was a collection of flower photography from the 1800’s up to present day and included images by Ansel Adams, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz to name a few. The interesting thing about that exhibit was that you could take a subject as simple as flowers, and photographers that specialized in all spectrums of the medium could approach it in their own unique way, but the beauty of mother natures creation always shone through. So over the last few weeks I have been going back to the same flowers every couple of days to re-examine them and to try to get a different perspective or angle. As a result I have decided to call this post “flora fotographica” in honor of those masters of photography whose work continues to inspire me each and every day.

The last two images I worked up as both colour and Black & White. Each time I view them I choose a different preference.