Tag: photography

From “Gustave Caillebotte: The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers” in The impressionists at Argenteuil by Paul Hayes Tucker:

“Vibrant fields of yellow and orange daffodils stretch across the foreground of this dramatically composed view of the plains of Gennevilliers across the river from Argenteuil….

“Their proximity to one another makes their bold colors and the impasto of their petals particularly pungent. Shimmering with light, they recede sharply into the distance between fresh green fields on either side. Prefiguring abstract shapes that Kazimir Malevich would devise thirty years later, these assertive geometric forms rise high on the picture plane to end considerably above the midpoint of the scene.

“At the horizon we encounter the only vertical accents in the landscape: a band of trees that proceed from the left edge of the canvas to a point above the junction of the orange and yellow fields. There the trees become more distinguishable as a series of poplars that continues out of view on the right. Above this orderly arrangement of forms hangs a sky that has been subjected to an equally rigorous geometric sensibility and made into a strict, virtually uninterrupted rectangle. No cloud disturbs its surface, extending the expansiveness that the fields suggest.”

From “This Fevers Me” by Richard Eberhart in The Language of Spring: Poems for the Season of Renewal, selected by Robert Atwan:

This fevers me, this sun on green,
On grass glowing, this young spring.
The secret hallowing is come,
Regenerate sudden incarnation,
Mystery made visible
In growth, yet subtly veiled in all,
Ununderstandable in grass,
In flowers, and in the human heart,
This lyric mortal loveliness,
The earth breathing, and the sun.
The young lambs sport, none udderless.
Rabbits dash beneath the brush.
Crocuses have come; wind flowers
Tremble against quick April.
Violets put on the night’s blue,
Primroses wear the pale dawn,
The gold daffodils have stolen
From the sun….

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Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring daffodils with yellow flower petals and rich red-orange trumpets. The first post — where I also explain the use of “red” to describe daffodil trumpets — is Yellow Daffodils with Red and Orange Trumpets (1 of 2).

These photos were all taken in the same general area, where fringe flower bushes provided background to the daffodils. Since the shrubs hadn’t started revealing their pink or purple fringies yet, the tiny oval leaves — in shades of dark blue-green — created a uniform color and texture that contrasted nicely with the yellow and orange (or do I mean “red”?) of the daffodils.

Whilst slinking around on the internet looking for some preambles for this post, I came across the quotation above about the painting “The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers” by Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte (image borrowed from List of Paintings by Gustave Caillebotte) — which, conveniently for me, is a painting of yellow and orange daffodils:

The quotation introduced me to the term impasto — where paint is piled on thickly to create physical textures on the canvas, so that someone looking at the painting will see both the raised textures and the shadows beneath them, whose intensity will vary depending on their viewing angle or the available light. To get a better look at the texture Caillebotte created, click the image to see a larger version.

I liked this painting because it seems to represent the natural conditions I prefer for taking photos of flowers: overcast days with plenty of bright light filtered through the clouds, creating consistent shadow detail across the scene while still enabling the saturated, often glowing, colors to catch the eye. I also think the impasto effect combined with separate ramps of color leading from the painting’s foreground simulates how we would see this scene in real life: rich with color, emphasized with texture, and enhanced to simulate depth by the lines that converge at the horizon. Just like a photograph, a painting like this is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene: the artist uses different techniques and effects to trigger our brains to transition from two to three dimensions and lead us to consider the painting as symbolic of something real. We don’t normally think through these things when observing a painting or photograph; but we can still deconstruct them to understand the techniques that have been used.

When processing photographs — whether done in the camera, using presets or filters on photo sharing sites, or through enhancements made with photo-editing software — we try to blend both the documentary nature of photography with our sense of an experience that the photograph represents. Here, for example, is one of the photographs from the galleries below, before I’ve made any adjustments (other than removing dust or spots)…

… where, as you can see, the dynamic (or tonal) range of the image is narrow, leading — most apparently — to very little color differentiation between the yellow flower petals and the orange trumpets.

A photograph taken with a modern camera may start like this, as a relatively flat representation of a scene — something that roughly corresponds to the negatives produced by film cameras in terms of the potential for a finished image. This is even more true if the camera is set to take RAW images (where additional image detail is captured but you would seldom consider the image finished as taken); and is still true with image formats like JPG, where the camera tries to balance the colors and tones for you, resulting in a rather bland appearance overall. To state this as a stretched analogy to Caillebotte’s painting: it’s like the first layer of color the painter lays down, before painting additional layers and colors to simulate greater texture and depth.

Here we have the finished version of this image…

… where I’ve created more depth by: reducing color and texture in the background; adding a bit of color to the blue-green daffodil leaves in the foreground; and — most importantly — adding contrast, color, and texture to the flower petals, since the flowers are the subject of the photograph and the difference in color between the petals and the trumpets is a distinctive feature.

Here are the two images side-by-side, for comparison.

Gustave Caillebotte and his brother Martial were both interested in photography, so it’s likely true that their relationship influenced both Gustave’s paintings and Martial’s photography — a fascinating subject on its own that might lead towards a better understanding of how the two art forms blended in photography’s early history. If you’d like to read more about that, see In the Private World of the Caillebotte Brothers, Painter and Photographer — which describes an exhibition featuring art from each brother, and speculates on this two-way influence.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “Yellow and Orange Daffodils” in The Spring Garden by Michael Jefferson-Brown:

“‘Red’ in daffodil terminology means orange or deep orange….

“The colour is derived from the same pigment as the yellow, the more concentrated the pigment the richer the shade. It has been one of the major concerns of breeders from the early years of the century to produce richer orange colouring. A most important success fifty years ago was ‘Fortune.’ This early blooming kind is still an important commercial cut flower. It was a big jump ahead when introduced. Its pale tangerine orange has now long been surpassed, but its earliness still makes it important. Almost as early is the newer and richer ‘Armada‘ with broad sails as petals and with a bold crown of glowing orange. For earliness ‘Sacajawea,’ a ‘Fortune’ seedling, is perhaps the most promising.

“Many of the most attractive yellow and orange flowers failed as garden plants because the orange burnt or faded in the sun, but now very few kinds offered for sale have this defect. In fact the reverse happens with many new kinds. The blooms open gold and a not very exciting orange. ‘Ceylon‘ is an example, but as each day passes the orange of the crown grows in strength and brilliance till the flower is mature. Now we grow ‘Ceylon’ progeny and such early kinds as ‘Straight Flush‘, and deep coloured ‘Falstaff‘ and Vulcan.'”

From “The Months: March” in The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges by Robert Bridges:

Now carol the birds at dawn, and some new lay
Announceth a homecome voyager every day.
Beneath the tufted sallows the streamlet thrills
With the leaping trout and the gleam of the daffodils.

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Hello!

This is the first of two posts featuring photos of early March daffodils that all have something in common: their flower petals are yellow, and the trumpets (also known as coronas) are in shades of orange.

Or not orange, but “red” as I have just learned, and you can read about that in the quotation at the top of this post. Botanically speaking, the deep orange that appears in some daffodils is usually referred to as the color red — and the author of The Spring Garden describes how that came about. It’s not entirely clear if all occurrences of orange in daffodil trumpets should be called “red” — but I did wonder if shades of red might actually be present in some of these photos, because they look orange to the eyes (or at least to my eyes).

Using a color picker from ColorSlurp to select colors from the ruffled edge of the trumpet in the first three daffodil photos below yielded some interesting results. Here’s a screenshot of some of the colors ColorSlurp uncovered…

… whose names are as delightful as the range of red colors they describe:

Nevertheless, the red is quite subtle among daffodils with this deep orange color, and only exists at the saturated edges of the trumpets. I may have to take a trip back to see if these daffodils are still in bloom, and if I can find red with my eyes if I push my face close enough to the trumpet. I suppose it’s a bit nerdy to analyze colors in flowers to this level of detail — or so I thought until I realized that the presence of red that is not obvious to the eye means I could have accentuated the color and texture of the trumpet ruffles by adding some additional red color; and that at least one entire book (The Color Dictionary of Garden Flowers) analyzes colors among parts of flowers (including daffodils) with this kind of detail. So there is still much color-fun to be had!

The rest of the trumpets in these photographs read as different shades of yellow or orange but no red. Personally I’ve never seen any daffodils with trumpets that strike the eye or the camera as pure red, but apparently they do exist — as you can see here. Notable, perhaps, is that the distribution of color through selective breeding leads the petals to move closer to white as the trumpet moves closer to red. Absolutely fascinating!

Thanks for taking a look!

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From “The Hybridiser’s Tale” in Daffodil: The Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“There is probably no more daffodil-like daffodil than the Division 1a cracker called ‘King Alfred’, a plant so robust it has dwelt in my mother’s garden for at least the better part of a century…. As American Daffodil Society founding member George S. Lee Jr. pointed out in the Society’s 1966 Daffodil Handbook, sixty-seven years after this daffodil’s debut, it remained the most widely grown variety.

“‘Without question, the creation of King Alfred . . . was the greatest single advance ever made in the progress of daffodils,’ Lee wrote. ‘Those who think there is only one daffodil — the yellow trumpet seen in florists’ windows — have King Alfred in mind.’

“Upon its debut in 1899 this radiant flower immediately won over the Royal Horticultural Society’s Narcissus committee with its charisma, size, regal bearing and richly uniform gold tone. That year happened to be the millennial anniversary of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great’s death, hence its name. Percy Kendall, a grower from Devon, brought the flower to the committee, but Percy had not bred this flower; his father, John Kendall, a daffodil enthusiast and former solicitor who died nine years earlier, had. John was well known in the daffodil world and for the committee members, seeing ‘King Alfred’ must have been like meeting a ghost….”

From “Home Thoughts in Laventie” by E. Wyndham Tennant in Poems of To-day: Second Series by The English Association:

Beyond the church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick
Two roofless ruins stand,
And here behind the wreckage where the back wall
should have been
We found a garden green.

The grass was never trodden on,
The little path of gravel
Was overgrown with celandine,
No other folk did travel
Along its weedy surface, but the nimble-footed mouse
Running from house to house.

So all among the vivid blades
Of soft and tender grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass
In noisy continuity until their very rattle
Seems in itself a battle.

At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil happy mind,
And searched the garden’s little length
A fresh pleasaunce to find;
And there some yellow daffodils
And jasmine hanging high
Did rest the tired eye….

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Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of early yellow-yellow daffodils that I took last week. The first post is Rise of the Yellow-Yellow Daffodils (1 of 2).

About half of the photos in this post were taken here…

… where the plants seemed perfectly happy to cling to a damp, steep, leaf-filled hill.

I took this group of photos from the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill — which you can see in the lower right corner — having discovered that I couldn’t stand on the hill and lean in to take close-up photos without tipping over. It’s steeper than it looks in the photo and was still soggy from the previous day’s thunderstorms. That I couldn’t get physically closer to the flowers (praise be the zoom lens!) got me thinking about something: after long, drenching rains, why didn’t the plants just let loose and tumble down the hill? Of course they have roots, but I puzzled on the possibility that there was something about daffodils that might make them resilient enough to stick-put despite relentless assaults from the clouds.

So — as one does! — I approached my research assistant with a tentative question: “I recently took some photographs of daffodils growing on the side of a steep hill…. I couldn’t help but wonder how they manage to stay in place there, especially since we’d had a lot of recent rain. What keeps them from just detaching from the soil and falling down the hill?”

To wit (or “to which”), Claude responded with a nice overview of the daffodil’s special skills:

Daffodils have an impressive ability to anchor themselves on steep slopes through several adaptations:

Their bulb and root system is their primary anchor. Daffodil bulbs are surrounded by fibrous roots that spread outward and downward, creating a network that grips the soil effectively. The bulb itself can work its way deeper into the soil over time through contractile roots — specialized roots that can contract and literally pull the bulb deeper into the ground.

The bulb shape is also advantageous on slopes. Rather than being perfectly round, daffodil bulbs are somewhat elongated and pointed at the top, which helps them wedge into soil crevices. This teardrop shape provides stability against downward forces.

Over time, daffodils naturalize by producing offsets (daughter bulbs) that grow adjacent to the parent bulb. These create dense clumps with intertwined root systems that significantly increase their collective anchoring power — essentially forming natural retaining structures within the soil…. Their strong, fibrous stems can flex without breaking during wind or rain.

The ability to grow successfully on steep terrain is actually one reason daffodils have been so successful both in the wild and in garden settings. Their effective anchoring system allows them to colonize areas that many other plants cannot, giving them an ecological advantage.

So the next time you plant or transplant some daffodils (or look at some pictures of daffodil roots), you will now know that their root system is “designed” to cling to soil on a hill, and that little cluster of bulbs that look a bit like radishes have their own job to do, acting as anchors to protect the plant by holding it in place.

This variety produces smaller flowers than those in my first post — though as you can see from these daffodils of the future, they’re still in their early stages of growing and blooming…

… and I’m sure I’ll make another trip back to the gardens to see how they’re progressing.

The rest of the daffodils are from the side of this walkway, where they’re being used as border plants so pollinators (and photographers) can get to them easily by ambling down the brick path.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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

“All wild daffodil species have now been used by daffodil breeders to produce the approximately twenty-seven thousand registered varieties, although the vast majority of garden and florist varieties are derived from genes from a limited number of species….

“The average garden daffodil has a big yellow flower with a big trumpet. ‘King Alfred’ (John Kendall, UK, 1899) is the best known and is everybody’s idea of a typical daffodil. It is derived from an Iberian species, Narcissus hispanicus, and if anything deserves the title of “ur-daffodil,” it is this. Narcissus hispanicus is a splendid plant, sturdy, richly coloured, early, and free-flowering. Only its distinctive perianth segments mark it out, as they are narrow and twisted — elegant but unlike the solid background for the trumpet we are used to. ‘King Alfred’ is a good example of [a Trumpet Daffodil], where each stem has a single flower where the length of the cup (i.e., the trumpet) is greater than or equal to the length of the perianth segments.

“Any cursory look at a collection of daffodils or at the pictures above the sale bins in a garden centre shows that there is a great deal of variation: there are white flowers and pale flowers, wide trumpets, narrow trumpets, trumpets which flare out a bit, and trumpets which veer towards orange, or even red-orange. There is often a difference in colour between the perianth segments and the cup… — these are referred to as bicolours, and it seems to be the general pattern that the cup is a richer yellow than the perianth segments. Except that there are some where the cup is paler than the perianth segments — these are known as reverse bicolours.”

From “From the Night of Forebeing” by Francis Thompson in Other Men’s Flowers: An Anthology of Poetry compiled by Archibald Percival Wavell:

Cast wide the folding doorways of the East,
For now is light increased!
And the wind-besomed chambers of the air,
See they be garnished fair;
And look the ways exhale some precious odours,
And set ye all about wild-breathing spice,
Most fit for Paradise!
Now is no time for sober gravity,
Season enough has Nature to be wise;
But now discinct, with raiment glittering free,
Shake she the ringing rafters of the skies
With festal footing and bold joyance sweet,
And let the earth be drunken and carouse!
For lo, into her house
Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet,
And all things are made young with young desires;
And all for her is light increased
In yellow stars and yellow daffodils….

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Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photos of the earliest daffodils that pop out of the ground in late February and early March here in the Southeast — where one can find them in bunches adding pre-spring color to yards, along sidewalks, and at places like Oakland Cemetery. The photos in this first post were all taken here…

… at a gated memorial garden in one of the cemetery’s oldest sections, where it’s fun to try and photograph the daffodils from different angles outside the fence, while using the wrought-iron bench or the black steel fenceposts as elements of the backgrounds.

The photos in these two posts are of daffodils I like to call yellow-yellow, because both the flower petals and their trumpets are shades of the same yellow color. As the season progresses over the next couple of weeks, others with alternating combinations of white, yellow, and orange will make an appearance, even as the yellow-yellow ones continue their bloom cycle.

As you can see from the photos, it was an overcast day when I took them, yet the colors are still so luminous that each of the flowers treats our eyes to a nice glow. One effect of the filtered lighting, in this case, is to add a little saturation to the daffodil trumpets, giving them a slight yellow-orange color cast that contrasts with the more translucent yellow of the petals surrounding the trumpets. Overall, though, the bright color is an attraction signal for pollinators, especially at this time of year when much of the surrounding landscape is still covered in its flat winter shades of brown and gray. While the gardens still wear this winter coat, the daffodils and the flower clusters they create are highly visible from long distances to both humans with their cameras and those emerging pollinators that want to get a jump on their spring business.

Thanks for taking a look!

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