“The process of making pictures involves keeping an open mind to single and serial image constructions, narrative and non-narrative formats, in-camera juxtapositions, and post-camera manipulations. How does changing the sense of scale, the size you expect something to be, affect viewer reaction? Does the unusual scale evoke humor, mystery, or horror? How does this make you rethink the subject? Consciously ask yourself questions like these: How does image size affect viewer response? How would changing to black-and-white or color affect the image’s emotional outcome? Examine how one photograph may modify the meaning of the image next to it. Consider what happens if text is added to an image. How can meaning shift with a title as opposed to leaving a photograph untitled? What is the most effective form of presentation, and what is the appropriate venue?”
“When making color images, the intensity and the relationship of one color to another within the scene plays a vital role in creating contrast. If you decide to make black-and-white images, then contrast is created by the difference between the darkest and lightest areas of the composition.”
“It’s clear that black and white is very important to certain kinds of garden photography. Why?
“For one thing, a black and white photograph is ‘art.’ In the context of gardens, black and white has a long history of rendering the shapes, forms, and composition of the garden….
“Up until fairly recently, photography was only black and white. Color was not an option. Nineteenth-century photographers, such as Eugène Atget (1857–1927) who worked near Paris, used the prowess of their monochromatic cameras to capture gardens around the world with a particular emphasis on the patterns and structure of formal French gardens. To some extent, this embrace of the static in garden photography was driven by technology: not only was photography monochromatic, shutters were also slow, so capturing anything in motion was non-trivial.
“As time went by, when color film was introduced, the great era of Kodachrome was on. Fast forward a few more decades, and the wet-film darkroom transitioned to digital. Not only is the default capture mode on most digital cameras or smartphones in color, to choose to render a garden image captured in color in black and white is an affirmative choice. In today’s world, to present an image in black and white is making a statement. The statements may well be: ‘Look at me, I am a work of art!’ ‘I am special.’ ‘I am the form and composition reduced to its essentials.’ Of course, it also helps that black and white photography is simply beautiful.”
Hello!
For most of my photo projects — where I clump a couple dozen similar photos into a Lightroom collection and work on them together — I often convert a few to black and white to see if I like the monochrome versions enough to produce a separate set. Usually, I don’t find them compelling; but for the mostly-magenta amaryllis I featured in the previous two posts (see Amaryllis, Mostly Magenta (1 of 2) and Amaryllis, Mostly Magenta (2 of 2)) the combination of colors in the pink-to-purple range (along with the slightly shiny glow produce by lots of rain the night before I took the photos) seemed to work out well in black and white. As I often do, I added a bit of silver tone (actually, a wee bit of light blue) to each of the images, which seemed to further emphasize the soft textures of individual flower petals.
“This interesting genus has had a hard struggle to establish its identity. At one period it had numerous species, and many sub-genera, all very beautiful. One by one these have been removed, becoming separate genera themselves, until there is scarcely enough left to hold the name. Some eight distinct kinds still hold, in trade, the old generic name….
“[The] Amaryllis is but little known in this country, while its synonyms are extensively grown and highly appreciated. Amaryllis is now simply a trade name for several genera, a popular name applied in the same manner as that of Calla Lily to Richardia, or Japonica to the Camellia. The genus formerly included Hippeastrum, Brunsvigia, Crinum, Nerine, Sprekelia, Sternbergia, Vallota and Zephyranthes…..
“The genus Amaryllis consists of but one species.”
“Instead of agonizing over perennials that will never be at their best in our climate, we should use plant materials adapted to our hot, dry summers. With this in mind I have been experimenting for several years with summer-flowering bulbs. The amaryllis family alone is an almost inexhaustible source for Southern gardens….
“The choice member of this family is the Amaryllis belladonna (July and August) with its six or eight lavender-pink flowers in an umbel on a two-foot stem. It is perfectly hardy, and has bloomed for me in the poorest soil in both sun and shade….
“The name Amaryllis is supposed to have been taken from a famous shepherdess mentioned by Virgil, and distinguished for her beauty.”
Hello!
Most of the flowers I’ve uploaded for this post (and the next one) I’ve always known by their common name, Swamp Lily (or Swamplily or Swamp-lily, depending on where you read about them). While it’s true that they are known by that name, it turns out — this may be devastating news! — that they’re not lilies. Shocking, I know, and not unlike something I wrote about previously — see Leopard Flower Variations — when I was equally surprised to learn that daylilies are not lilies either.
Swamp lilies of this kind are members of the plant genus Amaryllis, in the plant family Amaryllidaceae, and there’s a pretty good chance that the plants in these nine photos are the Amaryllis belladonna described in Elizabeth Lawrence’s quote at the top of this post. They may also be a variety of Crinum — another genus in Amaryllidaceae — but I couldn’t tell for sure from the photos, and when I went back to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens to get a closer look at the stem and leaf structures (based on the pointers in this video Crinum, Amaryllis, and Lilies: How to tell the Difference Between Them), the plants had, uh, gone on vacation. In any case, I now check Wikipedia’s List of plants known as lily page whenever I see “lily” in a plant’s name. The page probably should be called “List of plants you think are lilies but really aren’t” — and if you look there you’ll see two kinds of amaryllis listed, both commonly misnomered.
I took these photos the morning after a night full of thunderstorms, so most of the flowers were still weighed down with raindrops, as you can see from the pictures. I thought about trying to dry them off a little (though I hesitate to interfere with nature, you know), but then realized that the flowers hung more gracefully on their stems from the weight of water and — as a rare occurrence in the southeast — there was no pollen dust all over the petals and leaves because it had been washed away. Fresh and clean, they all glowed a little — in a range of magenta and purple colors (according to Lightroom) and some green, yellow, and orange among the leaves and the remains of desiccated flowers.
From Seeing Flowers by Teri Dunn Chace and Robert Llewellyn:
“Arguably the world’s most easily recognized and beloved flowers, lilies form a large, sprawling family of around 4000 species. It includes, first and foremost, true lilies, the glorious trumpet-shaped flowers of garden and florist and flower show….
“There are scads of lovely species to delight flower lovers, from the towering Chinese lily, Lilium henryi, spangled all the way to the top with gold-orange flowers, to the more modest, waist high Canada lily, L. canadense, which sports a good show of black-speckled orange to red flowers, candelabra style. You may have seen the evocatively named Turk’s cap ones, which have recurved petals; these originate from L. martagon and have been widely hybridized. The speckles, dots, or lines on some of these flowers function as air-traffic control for pollinators, guiding them toward the pollen in the center.”
