CALLA LILIES

In this time of coronavirus, a couple of weeks ago I acquired a new houseplant, this time some healthy looking calla lilies.  The plant included a number of fairly tightly packed blossoms, and I wasn't sure how to capture them in photographs.  I finally decided that my best bet would be to take photos of isolated blossoms against a suitable background.  I was able to isolate individual blossoms, and then it became a matter of depth of field.

The blossoms have a variegated green and yellow exterior and a primary yellow interior. My first effort was to isolate a single flower against a generic red background (a chair in our library).

I decided to crop the shot as a square, and I ramped up the color saturation.  I like the color combination, and I thought the increased saturation matched my aesthetic sensibility.  The issue was the depth of field.  This was shot at f/8 with my 90 mm macro lens, focused on the flower's top front edge.  Because the macro lens allows me to shoot from very close range--a matter of a few inches--the depth of field is quite shadow. Close inspection reveals that the back edge of the flower, just 2 or 3 inches further away, is quite out of focus.  There is something to be said for that, but I decided to shoot at a much smaller aperture to pull more of the flower into reasonable focus.

This next shot, which is of only a portion of the blossom, was shot at f/36.  This was an 8 second exposure.

The back edge of the flower is in better focus, but still not great.  I like the composition of this shot better than the first, even though (or perhaps because) it only includes a portion of the blossom.  Again, I increased the color saturation.

Here, for the record, is the same shot in black and white.

In this case I darkened the red and lightened the yellow.  I didn't think the black and white was quite as effective as the color version.

A few days later I spent some more time with the lilies, in this case against a textured white background (our bedspread).  First a shot of an entire flower.

This was shot at f/16, which produced fairly good depth of field for the flower.  The background was far enough away that its texture is sufficiently out of focus to eliminate it as a distraction.  But there is a different problem with this composition--the camera is positioned too low relative to the flower so that very little of the flower's yellow interior is visible.  So following is a second shot taken from a higher angle that does a better job of revealing the flower's yellow interior.

I then noticed that two of the plant's blossoms were positioned "back to back" and felt that that composition might provide some interesting near-symmetry.  My first shot was at a very narrow aperture of f/36 to bring both flowers into fairly good focus.  The focus was on the front edge of the flower on the right.

It is evident that the texture of the background is a significant element in the shot.  That's not all bad, but I thought I would take one more shot in which I separated the flowers further from the background to eliminate it as an element.

Here there is very little remaining background texture (except a faint line running diagonally in the upper right.  I like this shot, although it almost looks like the background has been removed artificially.  A matter of artistic preference.

John