My front yard features a good-sized garden, placed there by Verna, the woman who built my house. Unfortunately, she passed away before she filled the garden. And so little by little over the years I’ve been filling it with flowering plants that I can enjoy – and photograph. My photography is pretty powerful motivation considering that I really don’t like digging in dirt!
I never used to pay any attention to flowers. But when I started taking road trips several years ago, I started to notice them growing wild wherever I stopped to photograph things along the road. So I started photographing the flowers, too, and even started to seek them out. And now I wander around my garden every spring with my camera in my hand. I have a truly outstanding 55mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens that focuses to about nine inches. Recently I put it on my Nikon F2 and loaded some Fujicolor 200 and took several photos over a couple weeks’ time in my garden.
The shot above puzzles me, because in real life these flowers are blue. They’re in a basket of red, white, and blue flowers that I placed on my front stoop. I can’t figure out why they came out purple! Was it a limitation of the Fujicolor 200 film? Was it a fault in the processing or scanning?
Mom dug several plants out of her garden last fall for me to plant in mine. She and my dad are ready to move out of their home of 38 years, and Mom will be leaving her gardens behind. So I’m glad to have some of her flowers in my garden now. The bell-shaped flowers above are among them. I forget what they’re called!
Daffodils were among the flowers Verna planted, and they are always the first things to bloom. They are my signal that spring has begun! Here’s a fresh bud.
And here’s an opened daffodil from several days later. The oversaturated yellow and the lack of detail – do they represent more problems with the film, processing, or scanning? Hard telling. But it has me thinking it’s time to move away from consumer-grade color film for everything except trying out a new-to-me old camera.
Also check out the flowers I’ve photographed roadside: here, here, here, here, and here.
