Flowers and Assumptions

Flowers have always intrigued me. Everyone has seen thousands of photographs of hundreds of different types of flowers (the Cala Lily comes to mind as the most prevalent) in hundreds of different lighting setups.

One day I was sitting at home watching Dharma and Greg when I realized I was wasting my life away. I grabbed the D100 to experiment with some flower shots on my patio. It was an overcast day, so I grabbed the SB-28 flash, too. After several conventional (and boring) shots, I started to let my mind wander. And suddenly it hit me. Flowers are translucent, I wonder what a shot would look like if I aimed the flash at the camera and positioned it behind the flower?

Voila! This is what it looks like.




I must have shot a few hundred pics, as one is wont to do with digital. The batteries in the flash died, which I took as my cue to head inside and process. Here's another one.



I was pleased with a lot of the shots I took that day. Shots that I never would have taken on a film camera, just because of my preconceived notion that they wouldn't have turned out. It was a lesson to me in two things; don't let your assumptions get in the way of shooting the shot; and think outside the box. Originality is the main characteristic of creativity.