"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: neutral density filters

Twelve Dozen Daffodils (1 of 8)

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From Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury:

“Daffodils are true perennials. Some of the plants sold as perennials (as herbaceous or bulbous) have, in truth, a limited lifespan. Among bulbs, tulips and lilies are a case in point. In ideal conditions, they may live for quite a few years, but they do not go on forever and, crucially, have a limited ability to form clumps. Daffodils are not only immensely long-lived but continually clone themselves to form ever-expanding clumps. They are the bulb equivalent of those robust border perennials like hardy geraniums or goldenrod, whose clumps just keep on getting bigger and bigger….

“‘Daffodil’ in most English usages is used to refer to the classic florist and garden daffodil pattern: single flowers with a big trumpet-like cup, usually yellow. Anything else tends to get called ‘narcissus.’ There is no rationale behind this, and it makes life simpler if all members of the botanical genus Narcissus get called the same — daffodil. ‘Narcissus’ is derived from the Greek narco (‘becoming numb’), the same root as the word ‘narcotic.’ Here then is a hint of one of the few uses to which daffodils were put in traditional herbal medicine. [John] Gerard refers to the classical Greek writer Sophocles calling them ‘the garland of the great infernall goddes, bicause they that are diparted and dulled with death, should woorthily be crowned with a dulling flower.’ The Furies, vengeful spirits of the underworld in Greek mythology, wore daffodils in their tangled hair and used them to stupefy their victims.”

From Daffodil: The Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“Daffodils have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Born in Hampshire’s New Forest my roots lie deep in the rich soil of southern England, yet my childhood was one of perpetual motion as my family moved from one home to another, prompted by advances in my father’s career.

“Across my ever-changing world daffodils became a constant. As each winter receded they appeared anew, a radiant signal that the bleakest English season was done with and the New Year truly on its way. By the time I hit my teens my family’s travelling halted, and we settled in the countryside a few miles from a Thames Valley village. My new home was surrounded by towering woodland dissected by pathways that had been trod for centuries, dappled meadows carpeted all-too-briefly with bluebells — and each spring what felt like acres of drifting daffodils….

“As one daffodil variety melted away another materialised to take its place, a rhythmic dance through the spring chill that lasted, it seemed to my young mind, for ages. The blossoms were beautiful, injecting a lifeblood of colour into the drained winter landscape and we took them for granted. After all, they were simply daffodils.”

Hello!

We’re going to spend the month of April looking at photos of daffodils. How great is that?

I was originally planning to title this post series “A Month of Daffodils” — then realized I had EXACTLY 144 images processed up and ready to share, hence the current title: “Twelve Dozen Daffodils.” I like catchy titles, often leaning towards alliteration whenever I can — but “twelve dozen” seems compelling enough, especially if you imagine someone dropping 144 daffodils on your front porch, split into bunches every few days for a month.

I took the photos during several recent trips to Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens, and many of them were taken using a neutral density filter as I described previously in Early Spring Hellebores (1 of 2). The first five and next three images below show how that filter enables me to play with lighting and highlights: in the first five, the scene is dark overall but the flowers take on a distinct glow; and in the next three, the filter picks up similarly glowful highlighting on the green leaves in the background. The filter seems especially good at capturing highlights while accentuating the saturation of yellows, oranges, and greens, though it will be interesting to see — as the reds, purples, and blues of flowers like irises start appearing — what fun can be had with other colors.

Once upon a time a couple of years ago, I decided that I would try to consistently create eight blog posts a month. Why eight, you ask? Well, my original thinking on that was pretty simple: less than eight was not enough, but more than eight was too many. With the exception of December and my Days-to-Christmas posts, I’ve stuck with that number every month since June 2022, because it gives me time to take and post-process the photos, but more importantly gives me time to do some research on the plants I’m photographing. While I could surely post a couple of wordless photos a day and garner tons more blog traffic, just posting photos (not that there’s anything wrong with that) isn’t compelling enough to me, and I get a lot of pleasure out of the puzzling and stewing about plant histories and botany that I take on between photo-shoots.

With that in mind, we’re going to work through a couple of books about daffodils along with these posts…

Daffodil: Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill
Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury

… and write some to-be-determined somethings about what we learn. I’ve had the second book for a while, and just bought the first one, and stuck a few sample quotes from each up-top. Personally I’d like to read one called “Daffodil: The Autobiography of a Flower” — but so far haven’t found such a book. Nobody knows why.

Both books are good examples of ethnobotany — the study of relationships between human cultures and plants — with Kingsbury’s book (which I’ve quoted from before) taking a more scientific approach than O’Neill’s, which focuses more on the the daffodil’s cultural history. Well, at least that’s what ClaudeAI told me; I wouldn’t know yet because I haven’t done the reading, but — eeks! — I’ll need to do it soon!

Thanks for taking a look!

Fresh Spring Spirea

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From “Spirea” in The Natural History of Wild Shrubs and Vines: Eastern and Central North America by Donald W. Stokes:

“At first glance, the Spireas look more like wildflowers than shrubs. Their thin stems, only two to three feet tall, are topped with clusters of small blossoms…. They grow alongside many of our common wildflowers, such as Milkweed, Queen Anne’s Lace, and Loosestrife, and when winter comes, all remain standing with attractive dried flowerheads. But if you went to collect these plants for an arrangement of ‘winter weeds,’ you would notice one significant difference in Spirea. While the stems of the wildflowers have all died, leaving only live roots to start next year’s growth, the stem of Spirea remains alive, as you can tell by scraping the bark and seeing green beneath….

“One winter, as I examined a few Spirea that were sticking up through the snow, I noticed that although their main stems were alive, the dried flowerheads at their tips were dead. I wondered how the plant would continue its growth next year. Would the flowerheads drop off? Where would new stems grow? The following spring, I returned to the Spirea and got my answer. The living buds just beneath the dead flowerhead were growing into new branches. The weight of these branches was making the original stem bend to a horizontal position, with its old flowerhead still at its tip. On older plants I found that this process repeated for several years, creating a jumble of horizontal stems with dead flowerheads at their tips, and young vertical branches growing from them….

“There are four common native species of Spirea in the East. Three of them — Meadowsweet, Broadleaved Meadowsweet, and Corymbed Spirea — usually have white flowers in either a flat or a cone-shaped cluster. The name Meadowsweet is given to these plants collectively because of the pleasant sweet smell of their blossoms and their habit of growing in moist, sunny places, especially old meadows….

“The fourth species of Spirea, Hardhack or Steeplebush, is quite different in appearance from the others. It has a thin spike of bright magenta flowers shaped like the spire of a church steeple. The name ‘hardhack’ refers to the difficulty early farmers had with cutting them in meadows. The plants were very persistent too, for even after they were cut, they could send up new stems from their spreading roots.”

From “Late March” in A Slender Volume of Poems, Essays and Stories by Sara Margaret and Mitchell Rhodes:

It’s just a little chilly. April’s promise fills the air.
For anyone who’s looking signs of spring are everywhere.

Sunshine brightly glinting on new magnolia leaves.
Irrepressible forsythia bounding forth in golden wreaths.

Pointed spears of green attending yellow daffodils.
Poeticus narcissus preening beside the prim jonquils.

Miniature grape hyacinths growing low in clumps of blue.
Vermillion quince in flower with a mockingbird or two.

On slender branches circlets of white spirea beguiles.
Periwinkle twinkles in shy lavender smiles….

Hello!

Having photographed this collection of spirea in previous springs (see, for example, Bridal Wreath Spirea from last year), I can see how the growth of these shrubs matches the pattern described in the quotation from The Natural History of Wild Shrubs and Vines above. Where there were just a few spindly stems with sparse blooms last year or the year before, the plant has expanded to split off new branches and create clusters of flowers running their length.

The overall pattern of the plant’s growth reminds me of how spirea variants are often used in vases of flower arrangements to create contrasting lines and colors with other flowers. Yet I can also see that a vase full of long stems of spirea would be quite striking and stand on it’s own — with contrast provided by its dark red woody stems and tiny green leaves. The Photographer imagines snipping some of these stems and smuggling them home under his coat — but, alas, he behaves himself and is content with the photographs instead. Thieving has never been one of his skills, anyway; he would most likely get caught.

Thanks for taking a look!

Vinca Major, or Periwinkle

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From “Periwinkle” in Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager’s Year by Susan Tyler Hitchcock:

“Periwinkle is more than just a pretty ground cover. It has an interesting past and a promising future. Legends about periwinkle date back further than the facts we have about it, portraying a plant with influence over the devil. Herbalists proclaimed its powers. Apuleius, Roman author from the second century A.D., described periwinkle’s powers thus: ‘This wort is of good advantage for many purposes, that is to say, first against devil sickness and demoniacal possessions and against snakes and wild beasts and against poisons and for various wishes and for envy and for terror and that thou mayst have grace, and if thou hast the wort with thee thou shalt be prosperous and ever acceptable….’ Modern advertising could not give the plant a better promotion.

“And modern science has discovered more reasons to revere the periwinkle plant. Certain components of the Madagascar species, crimson-flowered Vinca rosea, inhibit cell growth. Doctors now include in cancer chemotherapy treatments steady doses of vinblastine sulfate or vincristine sulfate, two alkaloids extracted from the tropical periwinkle plant. While the vinca alkaloids sometimes produce unpleasant side effects, they effectively slow down tumorous cell reproduction. Periwinkle is no home cure for cancer, but these vinca extracts are among the most promising treatments for cancer today.

“The periwinkle that grows, wild or cultivated, around the United States and Canada is a smaller and less potent relative of the Madagascar breed. Its local appearance only reminds us of the worldwide search for cancer treatments deriving from the plant world. Vinca minor covers wooded corners, orchard spots, and landscaped yards with its shiny evergreen leaves. Its appearance in the wild often means the land was earlier inhabited. Early blue flowers spin open in the spring. Hybrids bloom pink or white or purple. Closely related, Vinca major stands higher, grows larger leaves and flowers, and doesn’t take so kindly to the wild. You will never discover a Madagascar periwinkle growing in the United States or Canada, outside a greenhouse. But the periwinkles you will find here have their own practical uses.”

From “Transplanting” in Living Above the Frost Line: New and Selected Poems by Nancy Simpson:

At an abandoned house site, edge of the woods,
lies a patch of periwinkle ground cover:
glossy green leaves, violet flowers,
a thick carpet spread across the forest floor.

I’ve come here at times to dig squares
so now periwinkle covers my side yard.
It holds banks of the mountain road near my cabin….

Imagine. All the vinca I will ever need….

Hello!

The batches of vinca major (or periwinkle) that I photographed for this post were entwined among the hellebores I posted previously (see Early Spring Hellebores (1 of 2) and Early Spring Hellebores (2 of 2)) — mostly in the shade of some elm and oak trees and a few large shrubs. They were also among my first experiments with a neutral density filter, which seems to have helped produce some very rich background greens for the flowers. The blooms varied in color from blue to purple or violet (depending on how much reflected sunlight they caught), and I shifted all the colors slightly in Lightroom so they matched each other as closely as possible. Still, you may see these flowers as more blue or more purple, depending on the level of blue light the screen your viewing them on emits (or restricts).

Vinca’s vines tend to grow close to the ground, somewhat loosely but often rising in small clumps. They don’t so much attach to surfaces as tangle around them, but do not mind climbing up a tree like those between two tree trunks below. You can find them throughout much of the United States (and other countries), usually early in the spring, and often in fields or along roadsides where those variants are most likely vinca minor (with smaller leaves and flowers) and often considered wildflowers.

Thanks for taking a look!

Early Spring Hellebores (2 of 2)

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From “Helleborus” in Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“Few plants are of greater antiquity, or more surrounded by legend and superstition than the hellebore. According to Greek tradition, the shepherd Melampus first became aware of its properties through observing its effect on his goats; and he used it successfully to cure the daughters of Proetus, King of Argus, of mental derangement — in some versions of the story, by dosing them with the milk of the goats that had eaten it, or in others, by the use of the herb itself, followed by baths in a cold fountain; so that for centuries afterward, the plant was famous as a cure for insanity….

“One of the species grew plentifully about Anticyra in the Gulf of Corinth, so eccentrics were playfully advised to ‘take a trip to Anticyra,’ and Horace calls a hopeless mental case: ‘One not three Anticyras could cure.’ So powerful a herb had, of course, to be treated with great respect, and Greek rhizotomoi or root-gatherers thought it necessary to draw a circle round it with a sword and recite prayers to Apollo and Aesculapius, before digging it up; keeping at the same time a wary look-out for eagles, for if one of these birds chanced to hover near, the gatherer would die within the year. It was also considered advisable to eat garlic before-hand, in order to ward off the poisonous efluvia of the plant. Later, the Gauls are said to have rubbed their arrow-points with hellebore before hunting, in order to make the meat killed, more tender.

“It was possibly introduced into this country by the Romans, who would hardly have allowed themselves to be deprived of so useful a plant; and it was much valued in mediaeval times for keeping away witches and evil spirits, and breaking spells and enchantments. If cattle fell sick, either through poison or evil spells, the practice was to bore a hole through the animal’s ear, and insert a piece of hellebore root. This was removed twenty-four hours later, by which time the trouble was supposed to be cured. The belief in the plant’s efficacy as a cure for mania continued right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries….”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring hellebores from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens.

The first post — where I describe some of the sorcery I used when taking the photos — is Early Spring Hellebores (1 of 2).

About half of the photos in this post were taken with backlighting or side-lighting; those are the ones that look like they might have their own electric light source. Others were from shadier spots (like those in the first post) where I played around with different combinations of dappled sunlight just to see what would happen.

Thanks for taking a look!

Early Spring Hellebores (1 of 2)

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From “Hellebores” in Flowers in History by Peter Coats:

“Old English names for hellebore are setterwort, oxheal and bear’s foot, which, less fancifully than Bishop [Richard] Mant’s description, refer to the shape of their leaves. But the most popular name for one variety of hellebore is the Christmas Rose. Hellebores are referred to by [John] Gerard by yet another name, neesewort, and recommended as a cure, not surprisingly, for ‘Phrensies‘, but with the advice that it should not be administered to ‘delicate bodies… but may be more safely given unto country people which feed grosly and have hard tough and strong bodies.’

“Hellebores, however they are named, are more popular with discerning gardeners today than they have ever been before. To have several varieties of hellebore in your garden is the sign of maturity of taste, of garden one-upmanship; they have become, in the gardening fraternity, a status symbol.

“Some hellebores, though not as many as are grown today, have been features for many years in Western gardens; and in Victorian times, and indeed up to the present day, while labor was available, the most prized flowers were those that were carefully protected in winter by glass bells, or in miniature greenhouses which were specially built for the purpose.”

From “To Mary Frogley” in John Keats: The Complete Poems, edited by John Barnard:

Hadst thou lived in days of old,
O what wonders had been told
Of thy lively countenance,
And thy humid eyes that dance
In the midst of their own brightness,
In the very fane of lightness.
Over which thine eyebrows, leaning,
Picture out each lovely meaning:
In a dainty bend they lie,
Like to streaks across the sky,
Or the feathers from a crow,
Fallen on a bed of snow.
Of thy dark hair that extends
Into many graceful bends:
As the leaves of hellebore
Turn to whence they sprung before
And behind each ample curl
Peeps the richness of a pearl….

Hello!

I’ve never photographed hellebores before. I’ve stumbled by them often, but would find their colors monochrome and a bit dull so I’d move on to something else. I don’t know if those I’ve posted here are possibly new plantings, or if I just caught them at the right time — but the purple and pink marbling among their blooms got my attention and this hellebore community was quite insistent that I take their pictures. This is the first of two posts featuring some of the ones I encountered.

Since I hadn’t previously photoshot them (and have never tried growing them myself), I don’t know much about them — so it will be fun to learn a little about their botanical history, and dig up some poems like the one from John Keats above, where he conflates a woman’s appearance with that of some hellebores. Or maybe he doesn’t, and he’s really just writing about hellebores, nobody knows for sure.

I don’t usually use any lens filters with my camera, except for some starburst filters that I’ve occasionally strapped on when photographing Christmas decorations. But I recently bought one — a neutral density filter — and the photos in this post (and the next one) were taken with that filter in place. I also have several hundred other photos of early spring flowers and plants I’m working on, all of which I took using that filter. Why, you ask? Well, thanks for asking and I will now explain.

As frequent visitors here know, many of my photos are from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, where there’s an enormous number of native southeastern plants displaying themselves in a variety of natural settings and lighting conditions. As many of these plants are sun perennials, I’m often photographing in morning or mid-day sun — conditions that can allow for capturing detail, but can introduce bright lighting (and harsh shadows) that can be a challenge to manage. I would handle this by under-exposing my image slightly, then adjusting out any remaining excess brightness (especially overly bright highlights) in post-processing in Lightroom.

Neutral density filters are often described as “sunglasses for your camera” — a perfectly fine metaphor for what they do: reducing a scene’s brightness without (theoretically) altering colors. They’re commonly used in landscape photography — especially with scenes of water or waterfalls to create a flowing appearance for the water, so commonly used that way that every article I read or video I saw about them described this use. But since their purpose was to reduce a scene’s overall brightness, I wanted to see what would happen if I used them for flower photography, especially closeups of flowers like those featured below.

So I put these “sunglasses” on my camera and headed out on an extremely brigthteous day — just to find out what would happen. The first thing I discovered was that — since the camera now had sunglasses on and so did The Photographer — it was really-really dark in the camera’s viewfinder, sort of like night at 10:00 in the morning. It took me a minute to realize I had to rethink my exposure settings — and where I was accustomed to reducing exposure (to limit excess sunlight), I needed to do the opposite: increase the exposure since the filter decreases the light reaching the camera’s sensor. Without doing that, much of the scene’s detail would be missing.

This first outing was a bit of a bust: I took 600 photos and threw most of them out. As I was unaccustomed to using filters like this, lots of things that looked relatively well-focused in the camera’s viewfinder when I took them looked like fuzz when I loaded them up in Lightroom. That focusing problem was easily corrected once I realized that it I was using slower shutter speeds than I typically did (which introduced motion blur); and shallower depth-of-field (smaller f-stop settings that reduced front-to-back sharpness).

But it was a good learning experience: I went back for a second shoot and took greater care when focusing, having figured out how careful focusing and closely monitoring exposure settings (and leaning towards over-exposure), could get me the results I wanted. What I see now — with a little extra experimenting — is that a neutral density filter helps accentuate colors on a sunny day by: reducing the amount of light overall, eliminating aberrations like blown-out highlights or excessively bright sunlight, and allowing me to overexpose and thus let the camera’s sensor gather more color from the scene.

By creating a better balance between bright and dark contrasts that way, the filter lets the colors show through, since they’re not overpowered by the light or hidden by the shadows. The resulting images are rather fascinating to work with in Lightroom: I can add saturation to the colors without making them look harshly brighter. And intense shadows on subjects are virtually eliminated — meaning that I can alter the darkness of shadowy regions and get some nice background color and foreground detail in photos like this.

I’m still puzzling about optimal exposure settings and how to understand (and explain) how using these filters changes my plant-based (haha!) photography. Because the filter alters how the camera interprets the scene and recommends correct exposure with its meter, I may need to try different metering modes. Since I’m photographing relatively small subjects close up, I usually have the camera set for spot metering — which makes exposure recommendations based (roughly) on the subject I’m focusing on. But it may be better to try multi-segment metering, which will recommend exposure settings across more of the scene that appears in the viewfinder. These observations are not precise, I think, because this experiment is just starting (and, oddly, it almost feels like beginning with a new camera), but I think I’ll keep using the filter with my spring and summer photography — and fine-tune my understanding of how best to use it and how it changes the way I post-process my photos.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!