From A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and the People by Sydney Eddison:
“In 1938, Elizabeth Nesmith, a pioneer breeder from Massachusetts, created an exciting new ‘pink’ daylily which she named ‘Sweetbriar‘. This early pink along with ‘Hyperion‘ weaves a soft rosy orange and pale yellow theme among the Aurelian hybrid lilies, sunflowers, and exclamation marks of lythrum at the back of my border….
“Over the years, these and other vigorous cultivars that once consisted of a modest fan of leaves and a single scape bearing only a few blossoms have developed into great clumps of graceful foliage surmounted by bushel basket loads of flowers. Most clumps have subsequently been divided innumerable times, with the result that I have more daylilies than I know what to do with. But no matter how crowded the perennial border becomes, I can never resist adding more. Nor do I discard the old ones. I could never bring myself to abandon ‘Norwegian Lass‘, which has large, open blossoms the color of clotted cream, or give up ‘Melody Lane‘, a vigorous yellow airbrushed with paprika — both products of the fifties….”
From “Photographing Daylilies” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:
“[As] photographers we must have an eye for [color] and for rendering it accurately…. [It] is best to photograph most daylilies on a cloudy day. Nothing is more wonderful for photography than the soft light available during an early morning fog or mist. Although bright yellows, melons, and orange daylilies may benefit from some sunlight, as a general rule never shoot pinks, lavenders, or purples in direct sunlight, since its yellow wave length will tend to render these colors as salmons, pinkish lavenders, or muddy purples….
“With some digital cameras, the cool tones may be so strong that lavenders and purples will be overly enhanced, particularly in early morning light, and some further reduction of the blue in the purple may be necessary…. Shooting photos in mid-afternoon is always a problem, because the colors of the daylilies, particularly the darker ones, may have undergone a muddying effect that the camera will detect….
“When there’s bright sunlight and no clouds, people may seek to shade blooms with their bodies or to use some such object as an umbrella to provide requisite shade. Neither is generally successful. The shadow, even that from a white umbrella, tends to gray or dull the bloom…. Though some may want their prints to ‘pop off the page,’ be sure they don’t pop inaccurately.”
Hello!
While I have quite a few books about botany, gardening, plants, and flowers (and access to many more), it’s uncommon to encounter photography advice in any of those books, even those focused on a single flower family like lilies or daylilies. The excerpt above from The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies is then a welcome exception, as the author diverges from his writing about all-other-things daylily to spend some time explaining how to accurately capture daylily colors and how to manage lighting when photographing these flowers.
As the author notes, and as I’ve often written about here before, cloudy days provide some of the best lighting for outdoor flower photography: harsh shadows produced by intense sunlight are reduced, and color is not over-saturated since less of it is reflected back into the camera’s sensor. But, of course, you can’t necessarily wait around for cloudy days (we had hardly any in June, so I wouldn’t have taken many pictures if I’d waited for clouds), so it’s good to experiment with different lighting conditions and see what you can do to optimize them. Finding ways to balance sunny-day lighting by composing for backlighting, side-lighting, or sun filtered through trees can work well — and that’s what I tried to do with these photos of pink daylilies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens.
Here’s an example where the scene has a lot of backlighting. From the camera’s perspective, this was the “correct” exposure, as it attempted to balance lighting between the foreground and background. I use my camera in manual mode, but I think this is similar to what the camera would render if automatic exposure settings were used since there’s so much bright light behind the flower. I could have zoomed in and filled the frame with the flower and avoided this dull rendering, but I liked the sense of summer sun splashing around behind the flower and wanted to keep the scene composed that way.
Because Lightroom lets you select subjects and backgrounds and adjust their settings independently, it’s possible to do a lot more with this image than simply increase its exposure or brightness (which would apply to the whole scene, including the backlighting). Here’s what I see in Lightroom, where the first screenshot shows the subject selected (in fluorescent green), and the second shows the background selected.
With these selections completed, I can switch between the foreground and background, and work on all their exposure and color settings as if each part was an individual photo — with the goal, ultimately, of recreating the scene as I saw it (and not how the camera interpreted it), with a bright pink daylily in the foreground and soft swatches of green and yellow from the grass and shrubs in the background.
Here’s where we end out… can you feel the summer breeze?
Here are the two images side-by-side; select either image if you would like to view them full-screen for comparison.
Most of the photos in this post got a similar treatment; it’s my normal workflow at this point to adjust foreground and background elements separately to help me recreate what I saw. This capability also means that I can manage well with a wide variety of lighting conditions — so I don’t have to stay home and wait for clouds to come in!
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
