Featured Image: Windblown Poppy

Windblown Poppy, Somerset April 2014

This image was made in our garden in Somerset. As the title suggests, its of a windblown poppy that grew in an otherwise empty pot. I used white printer paper for the background and cut a slot so that it would go round the stem. I can't remember if I used a tripod, or held the camera, but probably the latter. I didn't move the pot, so the image was made out of doors, with a breeze blowing the petals around, giving a double meaning to the title.

I've been through various phases in my flower photography - colour, mono, environmental portraits with shallow depth of field, plain backgrounds with front-to-back sharpness, and so on. I've always liked "specimen" images - a single flower, isolated - and I've made lots of them over the years. I continue to do so, but this is one of my favourites, if not my all-time best.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I have been trying to make another image like this for several years. Sure, I tell myself that I want to improve on this one, but the reality is that I just want to do it again, perhaps to prove to myself that it wasn't a fluke.

I never really got into square format images, partly because they don't work well on this blog, in my view - they don't fit the landscape format of a web page. But for this image, its the obvious treatment and I can't really imagine it any other way.

One day, I'm going to get a big canvas print made from this image and stick it on my wall.

You might be thinking that this isn't such a great image - the framing is dodgy, the white balance is off, etc, etc - but I really like it, and what's more, it comes damned close to the image that I had in my head when I released the shutter.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what its all about, after all.