From “How the Hydrangea Got It’s Name” in Hydrangeas by Naomi Slade:
“The name ‘Hydrangea’ is derived from the Ancient Greek words hydor, meaning ‘water’ (and from which comes the root-word hydr-, meaning ‘pertaining to water’, as in ‘hydrant’) and angeion, meaning a container such as a pitcher.
“People love a good story and are quick to infer meaning, so it is sometimes stated that the name is an indication of the plants’ thirsty tendencies and love of moist ground. It is even surmised that the name actually comes from Hydra, the snake-haired mythological monster, which the stamens could, with a modicum of imagination, be said to resemble.
“But the real answer or, at least, the most widely accepted one is that the buds of the flower, before they burst, are the same shape as an ancient Greek vessel that was used to carry water.”
More hydrangeas!
The galleries below show a mixed batch of hydrangea blooms from my garden, those that had been planted in my garden by previous homeowners and have come back to see me every spring and summer for the past fifteen years.
“[Many] hydrangeas have a ‘preferred’ colour, and they will lean towards this, regardless. Simply, some would rather be … blue….”
I started out assembling photos for this post with this image of two very blue hydrangea blooms. At first I didn’t mind the green leaves behind the petals, but after a while they got on my nerves and the hydrangea bones in the background made me nauseous (exaggeration alert!) … so…
… I removed the background, ending up with two floating flowers…
… and then created five virtual copies in Lightroom so I could crop the blooms as four separate photos at different sizes, plus a fifth large crop (of the first, most symmetrical bloom). Notice that in the fifth image, it’s more apparent that these blue blooms have purple-brushed petals… which is almost always the case with blue flowers of any type.
Side-eye note: These five images demonstrate one of (to me) the best things about shooting raw files, that you can crop out large sections of an image with little or no loss of detail, which is well maintained even after exporting the photos for uploading to a blog or website. As you may know, WordPress blogs compress images and reduce quality slightly; but if you click here to view the last image at full size, you can see that despite selecting only about a third of the image during cropping, it’s full of sharp detail.
Such was my delight at these big blue blooms that I thought it might be fun to do something else to the images.
I passed them in and out of the Nik Collection a few times, and while they looked fine with filters that converted them to sepia tones, or an antique look, or to an old film style, none of those renditions appealed to me that much. Funny how that works: you have an idea you want to do something creative with an image (without necessarily knowing what), and certain things strike you but many do not.
I then took several different approaches to converting them to black and white in Lightroom; and again didn’t like the results at first as they just looked like black and white variations of blue flowers.
Tools like Lightroom and Nik Collection of course provide the potential for endless possibilities and results. Yet I always try to think of that differently, as a way of exploring how we create and how we sense that something we create has reached a satisfactory “end state” — “end state” in itself being an ambiguous condition, never quite answering the question: am I done yet?
Whenever I feel a little stuck, I try two different mental tricks to change the way I’m thinking. First, in Lightroom, I try extreme changes for various exposure and color settings — which basically means moving Lightroom sliders to the far left or far right in different combinations to see what happens. Second, I consider what I usually do to an image, what changes I typically make (we tend to follow similar patterns or processes when creating pretty much anything), and try to break out of that pattern. In my former tech life where part of my job consisted of software quality assurance, such an approach would have been considered exploratory testing of edge cases to try and break the software; in photography post-processing it translates (for me) to experimenting with methods I don’t usually use to see what new potential is exposed.
Black and white conversion in Lightroom is initially a button-push, which typically renders a fairly flat (as in dull) variation of the original image — but many of the same exposure and color options (color in this case meaning the red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta colors in the original image) are still available. Adjusting the black-and-white renderings of those color channels not only teaches you more about how color is represented in photos, but it can also produce surprising effects. For all five of these images, I discovered that the tiny pin-buttons at the center of each four-petal flower cluster — which initially appeared as dark black dots — actually contained red, orange, and yellow; and increasing those three colors to their highest value (an experiment with “extreming” the settings) changed the overly prominent black dots to white or light gray instead. Before adjusting the red, yellow, and orange, my eye kept getting drawn to the dots; afterward, the dots blended with the rest of the flower and weren’t such a distraction.
In addition to the Sharpening tool, Lightroom has two other tools for enhancing detail: Texture and Clarity. With a black and white image, a bit of extra sharpening (even though I had already applied sharpening to the original color image), adds a little sparkle to highlights around edges without creating jagged traces that you sometimes see in over-sharpened images.
While I use the Texture tool frequently, adding more than was in the color image didn’t have much of an effect. I hardly ever use Clarity to add detail (preferring Texture’s more subtle enhancements instead); but in this case, I broke from my typical approach and played around with Clarity to see what would happen. Lowering clarity reduced detail and produced a uniform softness in the flower petals, while also adding a bit of brightness — and the combination of softness and brightness appears as a bit of glow throughout the blooms. An illusion, perhaps; but your eyes will see what they want to see… or maybe what I, The Photographer, want them to see. Ha!
Finally, I used Color Grading to add a bit of blue color back into the shadows, highlights, and midtones; that produces a light silver effect on whites that I like and, to me, is more appealing than flat white.
The End!
If you read all that, bless you! Treat yourself to some ice cream!
“The first mention of hydrangeas in any text was in 8th-century Japanese poetry, with it being noted that the flowers have different colours in different places; doubles were noted too. Wild forms with mopheads are known from various places in the country, and it is likely these were first taken into cultivation during the Heien period. Over time the plants became more popular but were never a major subject of interest: possibly because wild plants were so common and easy to grow, they lacked any real cachet. The irony is that it was only after World War II, with introductions to Japan of plants from the United States, that hydrangeas have become really widespread in Japan.”
“[Many] hydrangeas have a ‘preferred’ colour, and they will lean towards this, regardless. Simply, some would rather be pink….”
Wow, it’s September 12 already; I must have dozed off at the end of August and woke up in a new month!
There are some hydrangeas in my garden that were planted before I bought the house over a decade and a half ago, that surprise me every spring with a new batch of blooms. Colors vary — as hydrangea colors like to do — and this year one of the plants produced a couple of the most intense pink blooms I’ve seen so far. I didn’t do anything to encourage this color (though we did have an inordinate amount of rain, especially in the spring and early summer), so, apparently, the hydrangea decided to pink itself out.
When processing these photos in Lightroom, these two blooms are interpreted as magenta — magenta being the dominant color in the pink-to-red range accessible in the raw image file. Most white, blue, or purple hydrangea blooms will contain some green mixed among the petal colors, yet these pink ones didn’t — so, in the first gallery below you can see how I could shift green colors from dark to bright without any change to the pink in the flower petals. I often reduce luminance on green in my flower photos to blend the leaves more into the background and give the colorful flowers prominence; but in the third photo below, I did the opposite: I cranked the green all the way up to make the leaves look like they were lit separately.
“Hydrangea includes some 35 species of small trees, shrubs, or shrubby climbers, found in eastern and southeastern Asia and the Americas. The name comes from the Greek for a water vessel, after the shape of the fruit. Hydrangeas are plants of regions with warm and humid summer climates, the shrubby kinds growing typically in woodland edge habitats, and in Japan, along the coast.
“For gardeners, the distinction between lacecap and mophead is crucial. Plants are naturally lacecaps… with a large number of small fertile florets being surrounded by a corona of larger sterile ones, the latter attracting pollinators. Mutation may result in nearly all the fertile florets being replaced by sterile ones — a turn of events that renders the flowers totally dysfunctional as far as wild plants are concerned but which led to great interest from humanity….“
Let’s wrap up August 2021 with the last of my bluebird hydrangea photos — to be followed in a few days with a selection of my very own beautiful and bulbous mophead hydrangeas; or, as I like to call them: hydrangibles.
From Seeing Flowers by Teri Dunn Chace and Robert Llewellyn:
“The … flattened clusters of the lacecaps make hydrangea flower morphology easy to see. The bigger, showier florets that tend to dominate or stay to the outer edges are always sterile. The smaller, inner ones are fertile, and with pollination they will produce fat little fruits that lead to chambered seeds. It’s typical to have four or five petals, and between four and ten sepals. Peer closely — the true petals are clearly separate from one another, while the sepals are fused.
“Thus the pollinators, various flies and bees, may have to root around a bit to find the true flowers once they arrive.”
In my previous two posts (see Baby Bluebird … Hydrangeas (1 of 2) and Baby Bluebird … Hydrangeas (2 of 2), I included photographs of some bluebird hydrangeas from my garden shortly after they started their springtime blooming. The images in this post (and the next one) feature some of the same hydrangea plants, photographed a few weeks later as the blooms continued to get larger and more mature. So in the galleries below you’ll see bigger central clusters of tiny flowers, surrounded by the white (or bluish or purplish white) petals that are both larger and more numerous than in the baby bluebirds.
