From “Japanese Anemones” in A Family of Flowers: Clematis and the Ranunculaceae by Deborah Kellaway:
“The lightest September flower is the Japanese anemone. It looks positively weightless poised high above the herbaceous border on the tops of straight stems that never bend or tilt. If it is silver-pink its face shines in the light; if it is white it illuminates dark corners. It will grow and spread and flower in full shade, planted between shrubs….
“The white is always pure white, the pink is always cool pink with a trace of mauve in it, sometimes paler, sometimes deeper. There are no other colours, but there are many variants of shape, size and height, in a steady stream of new named cultivars. Some are relatively short; some (like ‘Luise Uhink‘) are semi-double with thin, slightly fussy sepals giving the flower the look of an aster….
“Among the whites, the old hybrid ‘Honorine Jobert‘ … is peerless; it is 100 cm/40 in tall, and its simple flower has five or more white sepals and a ring of golden stamens. It has adorned shady garden borders for a century, rising above hydrangeas and dull evergreens, robust in growth but delicate in detail, flowering for three successive months, almost too familiar to be showy, too obliging to be adequately cherished.
“Among the pinks, ‘Queen Charlotte‘ was E.A. Bowles’s special favourite. ‘It is so lovely’, he wrote, ‘that I cannot bring myself to root any of it out.’ It is not tall and has large, generous flowers, tip-tilted semi-double saucers….”
From “To a Windflower” in Selected Poems (from Moods) by Theodore Dreiser:
Excellent gesture,
Rare symbol,
Evoked by the sun out of the soil,
Obeying a compulsion of light,
A compulsion of thought,
But
So fragile
And yet
So aglow with sensation,
Warmth,
Impassioned color,
Form,
You are —
You are
A reaction to what?
A thought of what?
Recording whose mood?
Gaiety?
Breath?
I will sit before you and ponder,
I will seek to image you
As pure form
As thought,
Color — without color —
As idea —
Or tone, only, maybe;
I will think of you as pure feeling.
Beyond sensation,
And then —
And then —
Maybe —
These inscrutable things
Out of which you take your rise
Will interpenetrate
And dwell in me.
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Eriocapitella japonica relatives that are very likely a hybrid called Eriocapitella × hybrida, from Oakland Cemetery. This hybrid glows in the shade with its bright pink colors, and — unlike the white Eriocapitella in my previous two posts (see Eriocapitella japonica, the Japanese Anemone (1 of 2) and Eriocapitella japonica, the Japanese Anemone (2 of 2)) — it produces multiple rows of flower petals, earning its characterization as a double or semi-double anemone.
When I photographed white anemones for the two previous posts in September, these pink doubles were nowhere to be seen. It appears that their bloom time is slightly different or environmental conditions altered their cycles, as they’re all fall-blooming anemones that flower for several weeks. But the later appearance of the pink ones meant I got a chance to photograph quite a few buds that were just coming in, and the photos below progress through buds from earlier to later stages.
The galleries wrap up with five shots of one of the many hoverflies — bitty buglets that like to imitate wasps as they flit rapidly among autumn blossoms — that joined my photoshoot. Despite its still appearance in the photo, this hoverfly was constantly in motion, so getting a stationary view meant using a high shutter speed (1/750 of a second) — but also: resisting the urge to get too close when taking a shot, which would either encourage the hoverfly to leave or would reduce the focal distance too much to produce a clear image. The five shots are actually derived from one image, which — because I stood back when pressing the shutter button — was sharp enough to permit some pretty extreme cropping in Lightroom. Here you see the size of the original image with the crop I applied to produce the fifth version, followed by the result.
The five images of the hoverfly, then, are a series of successively tighter crops, made possible by the level of detail the camera captured even from a distance of about five feet with the lens set to 55mm. As I started taking mainly close-up and macro nature images a long time ago — often using a macro lens to do so — it has taken some mental retraining to remember to back away from the subject for photos like this, and rely on the camera’s capabilities as well as Lightroom editing to get results like these. It is, as such, a straightforward example of a photography workflow that aligns shooting techniques with post-processing to achieve a creative effect that departs from, but still represents, the original experience in the field.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
