Chrysanthemum fresh in the frost what use your beauty so late? Butterfly cheerful in the fragrance, your life neither comes too early, at cycle’s end you both meet your youth and grace intact till death
Western wind, snakes and dragons hibernate, all the trees with days’ advance fade and dry Such are the parts destined by fate….
“Chrysanthemum fashions have come and gone for thousands of years. The flower has been cultivated in China for more than 3,000 years, referred to in early records usually as yellow, the colour of certain wild species. They stood out because they bloomed in autumn, after the heat of the summer, and this is one reason for their popularity ever since….
“By the time of the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) in China there were almost certainly several varieties, since there was a grand market for chrysanthemum sales in the capital, while poets in succeeding dynasties wrote often in its praise. Doubles, a range of colours and multi-hued flowers appeared during the Song dynasty (AD 960–1279), with 400 varieties by 1458, when the first book on the flower was published.
“In Japan, the chrysanthemum took off as a national symbol in the early thirteenth century when Emperor Go-Toba started using one as his personal symbol; other emperors followed, and late in the century it became the royal family’s official symbol. During the Edo period many new varieties were produced and new growing techniques developed, often involving detailed pruning and tying to elaborate frames to shape the plants into pyramids, miniature trees or cascades, or encourage one huge, perfect flower. The latter technique was taken up widely after the plant was introduced to the West in the 1830s.”
Dusky red chrysanthemums out of Japan, With silver-backed petals like armor, Tell me what you think sometimes? You have fiery pink in you too… You all mean loveliness: You say a word Of joy. You come from gardens unknown Where the sun rises… You bow your heads to merry little breezes That run by like fairies of happiness; You love the wind and woody vines That outline the forest… You love brooks and clouds… Your thoughts are better than my thoughts When the moon is getting high!
Here we have red, red, red ones — blooms from several garden locations that exhibited mostly pure red rather than the red/pink/magenta I described in the previous post. It may be noteworthy that when magenta is absent, the flower petals take on a barely perceptible orange hue when lit by the sun.
“One of the world’s most successful commercial flowers, there seems justice in the plant’s name being derived from the Greek for ‘golden flower.’ Once larger, Chrysanthemum is now a much-reduced genus, with around 30 familiar herbaceous or subshrubby species recognised from eastern Europe across to the Far East. Polyploidy and hybridisation are common, so the origin and classification of this and related genera is still in flux….
“Chrysanthemum species are generally long-lived and often clump-forming. Some have persistent semi-woody growth, but others tend to die out in patches. Generally they are from woodland edge habitats, although several are common along seashores in Japan. Species are found in a number of climate zones, with many of those which have contributed to the cultivated gene pool from the Far Eastern humid subtropical zone….
“The Japanese emperor Gotoba (1183–1198) particularly liked the flower and started using a chrysanthemum graphic as his own personal symbol. Other emperors followed suit, and in the late 13th century it became the official royal family symbol. Today, in English-speaking countries, the Japanese ruling institution is sometimes referred to as the Chrysanthemum Throne. In the East, chrysanthemums have tended to be symbolic of long life, which is perhaps another reason for the popularity of chrysanthemum tea; in the West, however, they became a funeral flower during the course of the 19th century and so were frequently, superstitiously excluded from the home, even being seen as a curse in Italy.”
how shall we tell the bright petals from the sun in the sky concentrically
crowding the branch save that it yields in its modesty to that splendor?
Hello!
Toward the end of November through mid-December of 2023, I encountered some fabulous batches of many-colored mums at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens — but then got wrapped up in my Christmas project and am just getting to those photos now. I suppose technically these are “autumn mums” — but you know I like my alliterations, so I went with “Midwinter Mums” as the post title for this series.
For the first photos in this series, I selected those that had an unusual combination of colors. These mums at first glance appear red — as red is the most dominant color — yet among the red blooms there are quite a few, even from the same multi-bloom stem, that exhibited a distinct color variation that included magenta or pink. On some individual blooms, half the petals were red and half were red and magenta, or magenta appeared toward the center then gradually radiated to red. At first I just thought is was a trick of the light (you know how tricky light can be) and started shifting the magenta toward red in Lightroom — but then set them all back to keep the color variations intact. The first two photos below show how large this group of mums was; and you can see in those photos how magenta appears randomly throughout the cluster.
“Creativity is most rewarding not as something to practice ad hoc when making a photograph but as a general attitude toward life. A creative attitude may lead to the experience of flow, to occasional grand discoveries and meaningful breakthroughs, which is not the case when you follow familiar (convergent) recipes and templates aiming to produce predictable, preconceived outcomes. Put another way, the rewards of prioritizing creativity over success are ongoing and sustained. They grow cumulatively over time and may on occasion yield immense and unexpected rewards, even the possibility of enriching your life with new meaning.”
The world outside is dark; my fire burns low; All’s quiet, save the ticking of the clock And rustling of the ruddy coals, that flock Together, hot and red, to gleam and glow. The sad old year is near his overthrow, And all the world is waiting for the shock That frees the new year from his dungeon lock. — So the tense earth lies waiting in her snow.
Old year, I grieve that we should part so soon, — The coals burn dully in the wavering light; All sounds of joy to me seem out of tune, — The tying embers creep from red to white, They die. Clocks strike. Up leaps the great, glad moon! Out peal the bells! Old year, — dear year, — good night!
Though I drop back into oblivion, though I retreat Into the soft, hoarse chant of the past, the unsoaring, dull And songless harmony behind the screen of stone, I do not age. But I come, in whatever season, like a new year, In such a vision as the open gates reveal As you saunter into a courtyard, or enter a city, And inside the city you carry another city, Inside delight, delight. And it seems you have borne me always, the love within you, Under the ice of winter, hidden in darkness. Winter on winter, frozen and unrevealing….
To flower in a sudden moment, the bloom held high towards heaven, Steady in the glowing air the white and gleaming calyx. Lightness of heart.
Hello!
Well another year has bit the dust! If you’re reading this, you’re alive — and perhaps, like Iseult la Belle, you do not age!
For this post I had planned on writing a retrospective of 2023’s Christmas Project to describe some of my techniques and a few things I learned along the way — but, instead, I ended out un-decorating and de-glittering over the weekend to start the new year fresh and with a (reasonably) clean house. So I’ll still likely do the retro — but later this week or later than that. Stay tuned!
The first quotation up-top is from a book I just bought: The Interior Landscape: The Landscape on Both Sides of the Camera by Guy Tal. Like all of his books, this one explores the relationships between photography and creativity in incomparable ways, and would be an excellent addition to any photographer’s or artist’s library. I’m just starting the it, so — more on that later!
I chose the two poems above because they seemed to well-represent the transition between years: the first one a bit darkly, perhaps; the second one with flashes of delight. I often choose white flowers for a New Year’s post — and those I’ve included below were some I had taken in mid-December, after a couple of days of subfreezing temperatures. The first five are my favorites because of the desiccated leaves in the background or at the frame edges, leaves that gave off a rich orange/brown glow on a cloudy day and are actually leaves of lilies I had photographed previously. Old and new together: old lily leaves and new, white asters.
“Take a look at a handful of your favorite photographs and become aware of the path your eye takes. Generally it will begin at one point and follow the same path around the image before returning to the starting point. That is the hierarchy of visual mass in your image….
“Notice how your eye doesn’t do much more than give passing notice to the background. It does this because it takes only a glimpse to perceive that the background holds nothing of interest.
“Your eye will tell you naturally how the areas of pull, or mass, are distributed in your image. Now the point to all this: is this the way you want people to look at your image? If my eye goes to a bright triangle of light in the lower-right corner and kind of gets stuck there, is that where you want my eye to go? No? Then you need to do one of three things — exclude that white corner with a crop, diminish the pull of that white corner with a vignette, or provide me with an area of greater visual mass to pull my eye from that spot….”
“A white background allows you to show off the delicacy and transparency of your flower subjects…. A black background is also great for flower photographs and it is perhaps the most dramatic setting for floral imagery. On black, you can still photograph with the aim of displaying delicacy; yet it also provides opportunity to bring out the drama in flower coloration.
“When photographing flowers on a white background, I normally overexpose and aim for a rightward-biased histogram. The opposite is true when I photograph flowers on black: I underexpose and aim for left-biased histograms. Some underexposure deepens the black background and adds to the saturation of colors in the flowers.“
As the first quotation above explains, we often discount the content of a photo’s background when looking at it — giving it attention, perhaps, only if the background creates additional context for the photo or adds compelling shapes or color elements. A photo of a flower singled out from other flowers or plants in the background is perceived differently from, say, a photo of a flower in front of stone or concrete structures, where the stone provides color and texture that contrasts with the typical delicacy of the flower blooms. My third post in this year’s daffodil series (The Daffodils are Here! (3 of 4)) shows some examples: in the first gallery on that post, I positioned the camera intentionally to include parts of the nearby statues (partially out of focus) to create such a contrast, whereas most of the other photos feature only foliage in the background — and in those images the background provides mainly a perception of color (green!), with the background forms providing some shapely uniformity that is largely irrelevant.
Still, I often reconstruct parts of a photo’s background in Lightroom, using spot removal or healing brushes to replace distractions — especially since, when photographing outdoors, I have little control over light and some excessive highlights will often break through the darker areas, appearing as bright blobs that our eyes might latch on to. Since patterns of color and shape often repeat in nature photographs, it’s fairly straightforward to remove a distracting blob by replacing it with a leaf, or even eliminate larger objects (sticks, for example) that have captured too much light by replacing them with a batch of leaves, grass, or other elements so that the background ends out more consistent in appearance. I’ll also typically mask the entire background behind the photo’s main subject and add the appearance of additional bokeh by reducing noise and decreasing texture and sharpness, to give the background a smoother, softer appearance and further differentiate it from the subject.
With black backgrounds, of course, I don’t need to do any of that, for the obvious reason that nothing in the background will show through anyway. I still make decisions about what elements of the subject to include in the photo: in some of the photos below, I’ve kept stems or leaves, in others I’ve left them out. That depends on how much of the subject and immediate surroundings are in focus — like in the first yellow daffodil below — since the black mask will cause anything that’s blurry or out of focus to be more obviously so. So, for example, if in that same first photo the stem was blurrier, I would likely have excluded it from the final version of the image, or made it so dark that it appeared to fade to black.
How much of a photo is in sharp focus also helps me determine whether or not it’s suitable for this black background treatment: if individual blooms in the white daffodil clusters below were out of focus, I would typically decide such photos were unsuitable for this treatment. And since I’ve previously used masking to defocus the background of the original photo, it’s simple to flip the background I’ve already masked to black and check to see if the subject — especially around its edges — is adequately in-focus to look right as it contrasts strongly on pure black.
In the second quotation above, Harold Davis describes how you can use underexposure to create more saturated colors. This is very true, and works especially well for colors like yellow, orange, white, or green, where even slight underexposure deepens the colors and captures more texture in the shadows. It’s less effective with colors that are already highly saturated — like reds or purples — which will often need some saturation reduction in Lightroom to keep them from offending your eyeballs. I almost always use exposure bracketing so that the camera creates three images from each scene: one at my chosen exposure, one overexposed, and one underexposed, so that I can then choose the one with the level of color saturation (and focus) that I like the best. With flower photography, the underexposed photo is almost always the version I’ll end out using, whether I’m keeping the background intact or removing it entirely.
“By the late nineteenth century a wildflower became an economic resource, as daffodil flowers could now be sent to local markets. Daffodil production became a by-product of fruit-growing — the grass below the trees would be cut in late summer to make it easier to pick windfalls, which ensured that there would be reduced grass competition when the flowers emerged in spring; they would also be easier to pick. After World War I, Toc H, a Christian service organisation, promoted the picking of daffodils to cheer up hospital patients, and also began to sell daffodils at hospitals to raise money. Commercial picking also took off, especially since flowers were usually available for Mothering Sunday (the fourth Sunday of Lent), traditionally the beginning of the gardening season in Britain.
“During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, the income from picking daffodils actually became quite important, as it was the only independent income for agricultural labourers in the area, doubly welcome for it being at a time of year when there were few other sources of income. Others joined in too, especially Gypsies and casual workers from the Midlands….
“The flowers became an early tourist attraction, with a special Daffodil Line train running between the villages and the nearby town of Newent.”
I may rustle up some of these on black backgrounds, but unless I come across some not-so-far-photographed variations, I think I’ll move on to selections of other spring photos in my backlog: plum, apricot, and cherry blossoms; baby dogwoods (puppywoods?); batches of red, wild, and lady tulips; some early white irises; and a few other species that are so fresh out of the camera I haven’t identified them yet. Spring is very much springing!
