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Trying Something New … in Pink and Blue

Making an artisan life each day means challenging your creative self to try new things you’ve not done before. It can be a brand new pursuit or even a small thing connected to something you already do, and today I took this challenge by trying something different with my photography.

I brought home flowers – armloads of beautiful blue hydrangeas and pink cottage roses – to shoot during the golden hour, but not outdoors for a sunset like my usual. Instead, I photographed indoors while the golden hour’s stunning light poured through my windows and bathed the flowers in its warm glow. It took my breath away.

Shooting indoors with incoming golden hour light is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while, but the lure of dramatic sunsets seemed to always pull my camera and me outside. However, writing yesterday’s post (which included my favorite flowers) got me thinking that maybe … just maybe … tonight the light would be right for my experiment. I think it was.

Given how quickly the golden hour, like the blue hour, comes and goes, I knew I’d need to be prepared and work quickly when it was time. So, in advance I set up the table and backdrop, both chosen for their deep hues which I thought would work well with golden light.

Since I wanted to use multiple vases, flower height would be important, and I sketched out in my head the sequence of tall stems to shorter stems. Of course, you always can cut more but you can’t add it back once it’s cut! This meant that the taller vases would come first, and I quickly would work my way down by photographing and then cutting stems for the next sized vessel.

In hindsight, I probably should have selected only one flower type because it was challenging to do multiple setups with different flowers, all the while knowing golden hour light fades swiftly. But really, who could choose between pink cottage roses and blue hydrangeas anyway??

With the blue hydrangeas set up in a 14″-tall metal container (for their first shoot), and the pink cottage roses arranged in a 7″ piece of brown crockery, I took a deep breath and hoped time and light would be on my side. And when that unmistakable golden light started filling my house, I moved quickly taking frame after frame without checking the camera to see what I was getting — shoot, shoot, cut stems, cut stems, arrange in next-shorter vessels, and repeat!

In yesterday’s post when I said white roses are my favorite, I was talking about the long-stemmed kind of rose. But I like photographing cottage roses better. They’re more informal, quirky, less conventional – think acres and acres of wild roses spilling over each other without rhyme or reason! They definitely have a personality all their own.

And blue (and purple) hydrangeas are a lifetime favorite flower, and now that I think about it, they also have more of a casual air about them. I love the ones with big moppy heads like these today, and you simply cannot take a bad photograph of hydrangeas!

Today’s stretch to do something creatively different was fun, and it reminded me it’s good to mix things up now and then because you never know just what you might get! What new creative things are you interested in trying? Please share below!

November 28, 2021

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