Approaching the flower with a dark background: how it might work?

Asher Kelman said:

Mike,

Very cleanly imaged flowers. What do you think of cropping ech to lose the top 35-40%? In each case it keeps asymmetry. With the image on the right, one also gets a pleasing gradient of background lighting from left to right. Thats a great idea for us to think of. Here, even though the flowers end up centrally placed, the b.g. lighting makes the picture work in the crop I suggest.

Asher

Could you name them, by the way.

Click to expand...

Hi Asher

Sorry for the delayed response. I hadn't considered your suggested crop before - in part because I shot them to be placed on oposing pages in the book. The tighter crop works better as a standalone image in my view, and I'd lose the oof blue one.

The yellow flower is a poppy and the blue one a forget-me-not. Interestingly, poppies (red or yellow or even the big blousy orange ones) are almost impossible to get rid of once you have them as the tiny seeds can lie dormant in the ground with only a small proportion germinating each year. Some will wait for 20 years before they germinate and produce more flowers and seeds. The forget-me-nots just creep around our house in the bits of soil that lie twixt wall and path. Again, they don't seem to be going anywhere.

Mike

Black, no - dark, yes

My personal opinion, is that for something as stark and simple as a flower, it is very rare that a black background works. One needs a truly exceptional subject for that, and I am not sure that most (any?) flower provides that? What I do like, is a very dark background featuring soft hints of shapes, and (when doing work in colour) complimentary colours.

This is a recent flower photograph I took, very boring, but I took it because of the tonality, and yet another attempt to see if very shallow depth of field can "work" for a shot like this, without being too distracting:


(Hand-held, Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko 90mm Macro at f/2.0, Ilford FP4+, self-developed in D76)

P.S. Willam, that is an awesome image, very powerful, very clean. Unlike my snapshot-esque image taken on grainy 35mm film