Christmas Approaches ..

And along with it the opportunity for photographing our stunning Christmas Cactus. This Christmas cactus gives us beautiful pink and white blooms at least once a year come November or December. She is usually early when blooming and starts opening the buds just about Thanksgiving every year. All the blooms will have dropped and faded away by the time Christmas day actually arrives.

Enjoying the blooms ..

Besides photographing these awesome flowers, I have to remember to just enjoy them. So every morning I take a look at the flowers and feel thankful I’m able to see and enjoy their short lived beauty.

There are ways to ensure these plants bloom on time, but I don’t really feel like messing around with darkness and light trying to figure out how to do that, so I just let it bloom whenever it feels like it’s ready. On occasion it does bloom in the summer but not like this, and definitely not full of beautiful blooms like it is today.

The Photography..

For these first set of photographs, I just simply shot the plant, buds and blooms in its raw form. What I mean by this is just simply point-and-shoot. I wasn’t after any artistic styled photos. I’m going to save those for a little later on in this post. I will incorporate a method of singling out a single bloom in order to capture an artistic shot. For now it’s simply the plant and the product it works so hard to produce over the past year.

First I want to share the plants location..
A nice highly lite (Sunny) spot by the read sliding door. It is quite happy here and I have no plans on moving her since she is doing so well in this location.

The Artistic Shots ..

I went ahead and did what I said I wouldn't do, and moved the plant. Don't worry though, I will put her back safe and sound when I am done with my artistic photo capturing. I moved the cactus to a bright sunny spot in the dining room. The bright surface of the table is highly reflective and coupled with the bright sunlight, this is going to make for some decent lighting (without the use of flashbulbs or artificial supplements).

Plus, this way it will be easier to work my way around the plant and pick out a single flower or two, to photograph. I am glad I decided to take these shots fairly soon, because I can already see that some of the first flowers to open, are already wilting.

Subject Isolation ..

Like I said I want to single out a flower for these shots. To do this I need to reduce the frame clutter or frame business. What this means is that if I just shoot a flower next to, in front of or around the other flowers and plant material, the frame will be too busy and the subject (the flower) will be lost in the madness.

So how do I suppose I will accomplish this?

I can't think of a better way to do this than to use my trusty old pieces of scrap hard board (left over matt board). I have used this before in several shots of various things, and you may remember seeing it. It's always a good idea to carry a piece around with you if you can, for those macros that need subject isolation.

I'm going to use both black and white pieces of paper..
Why? Because they are very neutral tones. Neutral tones won't mess with the color settings on your camera, regardless of whether its a high tech digital SLR or a small compact phone lens. Your camera will meter or adjust to the colors within the frame accordingly, thus the overall color field may change drastically from what you see to how your photo appears. So I will take a simple step to ensure I don't throw off my cameras ability to capture what I want, and how I want it to look.

I will place the pieces of matt board like so (see bellow photos), holding it with one hand and the camera with the other.

Finally The Real Photos!

I plan on creating a few other posts with these pictures I gathered, since this post is already growing long and feels winded. Also the more of these higher resolution photos I throw on here, the longer the will take to load for some of you.

I did step the resolution down a little, an thus some of these shots may appear a tad bit grainy.

I think they came out pretty fantastic, and are a great representation of the beauty I am seeing with my own eyes. The work in setting up these shots was well worth the time and effort. In my opinion at least.

Enjoy the shots Photography Lover's!

The first one is a bit overexposed, but that's what I was looking for. I wanted a washed out look with a bright white background.

I made this one just a little under exposed to capture more of the naturalness and softness of the flower.

A little contrast never hurts.

A LOT of contrast never hurts either!

Here I tried to adjust the exposure in order to make the background as white as possible.

I tried to get that background as black as I could without loosing any of those cool details, when editing this shot.

Not sure these will excite you or not. I used both of the matt boards together to create a contrast of black and white. Now those are more what I call artistic. Don't you think?

That's all for now. Check out my blog for a second or third post on this subject. I have a few black and whites as well as a few extreme color shots I am stull tweaking.

“It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.”
― Zamyatin, We

Thank you for swinging by my blog and checking out the post. Have a great day!

All words, pictures and art pieces are the sole property of B D Miller Gallery, unless otherwise noted and credited, and are not to be reproduced or copied without the prior written consent of B D Miller Gallery.

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