Black and white flowers?

click photo to enlarge
Of all the photographic subjects that might benefit from conversion to black and white flowers appear to be the least suitable. It's true that photographers find them an attractive subject because of the shapes of their blooms and leaves, their growth habits and locations, the way gardeners and arrangers plant and display them, etc. But it's surely the variety, strength and subtlety of their colours that is the main quality that draws us into pointing our cameras at them. Consequently, most of the photographs of flowers that we see are colour images and very few are monochrome.

And yet some of the secondary qualities beyond colour are reason enough to consider converting the right subject to black and white. In the past I've found the subtle gradations of grey that appear when a rose bloom is converted to black and white to be very appealing.

Today's photograph is of a flower that I wouldn't have thought of converting to black and white until I had processed the colour shot and was sitting in front of my computer reflecting on the finished image. I'd chosen my usual black background for the yellow flowers, green leaves and clear glass vase and that gave it a very strong silhouette. It was the overall compositional shape - a variant of Hogarth's serpentine "line of beauty" - that made me have a look at the shot in black and white. The conversion made the silhouette (reverse silhouette I suppose) stronger, and the yellow blooms retained their impact as greys and white. The final image, with a little judicious dodging of the individual flowers stands as a photograph every bit as strongly as the colour version but offers something different to the viewer. Of course, placing colour  and black and white versions of the same shot side by side tends to make the viewer choose which they prefer. However,the question about colour and black and white need not be one of "either" and "or" but can simply be about "also"!

Incidentally, the flower in question is one that I always call Kerria but I looked up the Royal Horticultural Society's "preferred common name" and found it to be Japanese Rose. That doesn't seem to me a particularly descriptive name because, though the plant is biologically part of the Rosaceae family, it has none of the most commonly understood characteristics of the rose. I'd have chosen one of the other charming and traditional English names that have been bestowed on the plant down the years - probably "Bachelor's Buttons"!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 0.6 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

Curve stitching, string art and organ pipes

click photo to enlarge
When I was in primary school, aged about ten years old, a teacher introduced us to curve stitching - the art/mathematics of arranging straight lines in such a way that they produced optical curves and circles. First of all we were shown how to do it with a ruler and pencil on paper, then we progressed to making pictures using this principle: that involved card and coloured threads. I seem to recall that my piece of work involved a yacht under sail on a rolling sea with the sun overhead. It was engrossing fun. Pictures made in this way are often called "string art", though there is very little art involved in the process.

Those lessons from decades ago came to mind when I was processing this photograph of some church organ pipes. The builder of this particular instrument - G. M. Holdich of 4 Judd Place East, New Road, King's Cross, London, according to an affixed plate - had arranged the mouths of the pipes in a curve that was higher in the centre. This gave me the opportunity to select an ogee section of these in the viewfinder and compose a shot that incorporated a "line of beauty." However, when I came to process the image on the computer what should have been obvious, had I given it any thought, then struck me quite forcibly: the "curve" was actually made of a series of horizontal lines each stepped slightly in relation to the other. Not curve stitching proper, perhaps, but a curve made of straight lines, nonetheless, hence my memory of the fun in school.

These organ pipes are not as decorative as those I posted a while ago. However, a bright day was causing them to reflect shafts of sunlight on stone columns and walls that were coloured by light through stained glass in such a way that I thought them worthy of a photograph

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On