50 photos of a favorite subject

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

The assignment this week was to take 50 photographs of a familiar subject, challenging me to go beyond my familiar ways of seeing it.  It turned out to be an exhilarating, liberating experience.  I chose a sweet baby cyclamen in a little stoneware pot that sits out on the railing of the stairs to my side yard.  It was already an inspiration for having grown itself from a seed of a spent flower dropped from an old gift plant.  After putting out four little leaves this past fall, it couldn’t wait to start blooming and by Thanksgiving was showing off the same flowers that are still on it now in mid January, though it did produce one more leaf.  Here it is in a no frills photo at the beginning of this exercise, with the neighboring apartment building in the background.

To increase the challenge, I decided not to move the pot in any way and to accept the fact that this area at this time of year is in perpetual shade.  So no lovely sunlight through the petals. 

Now the adventure began.  Once I get behind the lens, time means nothing, unless I happen to be with someone else who’s operating on Human Standard Time.  Since I was alone here, I kept going until my fingers got too cold, took a break and then went at it again.  I easily took more than 100 photos.  In the evening I sorted through the images I’d taken, decided I’d missed some options, and took another 50 shots the next day.

None are outstanding, but here are a few I sort of like and probably wouldn’t have taken were it not for this assignment.



I considered editing out that little bit of stem on the lower left, but the photo seems somehow weaker without it, as though it provides a hint of anchoring context.

 

I like the slight moodiness here.  And with all but the flowers quite neutral it almost looks like a black and white photo except for the jolt of magenta.  The patches of light on the wall are bounced reflections off the windows of the neighboring building.



The most fun came when I’d exhausted the obvious angles and distances.  In fact I began to experiment with being playfully, willfully “baaad,” by which I mean deliberately breaking as many of my unspoken rules of what a photograph should look like as I could.  Because this entire experience was far more important for me than any of the resulting images, I’m going to show a slew of examples below, including “wrong” ones. 



I framed with the image divided almost in quarters



I ignored most of the plant



I got as far away as I could without losing the color of the cyclamen



more deliberately odd framing



leaving most of the frame empty



focussing entirely on the background and abstracting the flowers

I’ve gained so much that I think I’d like to do this 50 (or more) challenge at least once a month.  The only drawback is that the amount of time taking the photos didn’t come close to the amount of time I spent poring over them afterward, assessing and sometimes making Photoshop adjustments. But I wasn’t bored or tired of the process for a second.