Past Prime

As I indicated in my previous entry, I have recently come to realize that flowers that are not freshly cut and in full bloom are entering a more visually interesting phase.

I had the studio set up to take some pictures of dolls for one of the fellow artists at the Torpedo Factory.   Walking out to the car I spotted a tiger lily that was. how shall I put this, entering a different phase of its existence.  It was quite interesting and I cut it off and took it into the studio to photograph.

To make a long story short, I have made about 300 photographs of flowers in various states of transition.  Nothing exceeds like excess!  No flower in the neighborhood is safe.  Folks are leaving flowers for me in my mailbox at the Factory and in sacks attached to the door of my studio.

I think the word is out that if you have dead flowers, give them to Jim.

A little note on the technical side.  These are taken with my Nikon D800e and the Nikor 105mm macro lens.  I used Helicon Focus software to focus stack the images to that I could get the depth-of-field required to execute the images the way I wanted.  You can see more here.

Beauty

I have recently started shooting flowers in the process of "passing into another state."  What I have come to realize is that they are possibly more beautiful than they were when they were "fresh."

This started be thinking about the concept of beauty in art.  Beauty is seductive both to the artist and the critic.  Beauty is difficult. I suspect that critics find it difficult because they are afraid of what other critics will say about them if they give a great review to work that it is beautiful.  Artist find it difficult to deal with in a serious way.   We are afraid that someone will trivialize our work by saying it is "pretty."  That's almost as bad as saying it's boring!  Trust me, boring is worse........

In showing the flower pictures, I am struck by how many folks comment that they didn't realize that dieing flowers could be so beautiful.  Maybe this is a result of seeing them large where small details are made visible. Who knows?

Many photographers today seem to be afraid of beauty.  We see portraits of people staring blankly at the camera,  deserted building, and the truly banal passed off as "great art."

Maybe I'm just out of touch........