death of a flower Archives - Sanders Meanders

Death of a Flower: Protea

For this series, I’ve been trying to find flowers that stay upright as long as possible. The idea of a drooping, wilted flower is really appealing at first, until you realize that, for the most part, wilted flowers pretty much look the same. I went with sunflowers, and loved the result. I started to look for more flowers with hearty stems, and one day, while at the nursery, I found something I didn’t know existed in nature.

Behold, the pincushion protea. They had two of them, and it didn’t take a second for me to decide that this would be my next subject. I saw the hearty stems, the strange, unearthly center and the curly tendrils on the outside, and I was entranced. This one pictured above also had these wonderful ribbon-like portions woven through it. I couldn’t wait to see what results this would bring.

At the nursery, the woman who checked us out lamented, “I love these. We don’t get them in that often. Unfortunately, they don’t last.”

I assured her that it wouldn’t be a problem.

I took this shot on day 1, and I loved the look of it, the almost mirror-like effect. So much so, I decided that for these flowers, I would shoot a similar shot during each session.

The woman at the nursery was quite right. By day 6, the pincushion proteas had already transformed.

The color had faded and the head had dropped. The beautiful extensions had become disorganized, like unruly hair. I was a bit concerned that the entire flower might just snap off, but it held firm. I carried on with the matching mirror shot—an amazing difference between the two.

I continued on through to day 10 with the proteas. I might have continued further, but the fact was, they had already become what they were to become.

As with all of the flowers I’ve used as subjects, the human qualities stood out, and deepened as the days passed. Their heads remained high, almost proud of what they had evolved into. The leaves became arms, spread out, almost as if to say “I’m here!”

I was so happy with this last shot that I had a large version printed and now it hangs on our wall. Despite the fact that I don’t have another picture of what this looked like on the first day, it has a fascination all its own. Even if you don’t know what a pincushion protea looks like fresh, you can imagine it in your head, looking at this picture.

But just for reference, here’s what they look like, side by side.

Here are some of the others in the Death of a Flower series:

Death of a Flower: Gerber Daisy

After several different subjects, and finding that the flowers with the hardiest stems seemed to produce the best results for this “Death of a Flower” series I’ve been working on, you would think I would continue on this path, wouldn’t you?

I couldn’t resist. The sunflowers showed me how vibrant colors showed up in the studio, so when I saw these gerber daisies, I knew they had to be the next group. The centers looked like eyes, how could I say no? The stems weren’t that thin, and in fact, when I looked at the back of them, it appeared that a wilted version of this flower might be very interesting. I took several shots from the reverse side the first day I had them.

I wasn’t worried about the petals falling off like they had with the lilies I had tried out a few weeks earlier. I was more anxious about wilting, and there was no doubt they were going to wilt. It was just a matter of how fast, and how hard it was to get a good image. Face down, I thought, these couldn’t be all that interesting.

At this point I was still finishing up with the hydrangeas, so I let the gerber daisies go a while. I got back to them on day 5, and by then, half of them had already started to droop. But they didn’t quite cave. They gently bent. Downcast almost.

Now I wasn’t seeing an eye, I was seeing a whole face, a head, a neck. It would be fleeting, I knew that, but just for this moment, this group showed me something marvelous. The three that weren’t wilting yet were producing something just as great.

These two showed a bit of decay, but for the most part, they were holding up. They had a steadfast quality. I went back later in the day and shot the same flowers, this time, getting more contrast from the background:

One thing I did not do at this point, which on reflection would have been a good idea, was to take another group, so you could see how different they all were already: three of them drooping, two with their faces to the sky, and the sixth…

…looked like a staring eye. I took several shots of this particular one on day 6. This one was my favorite. As the days passed the yellow flecks became more and more prominent, adding a nice color accent to the image. Meanwhile, the three drooping daisies got droopier.

The petals, instead of dropping off or hardening to a crisp, wrapped themselves back and around, giving a strange motion to the still image, as if the whole flower were rotating on the axis of its stem. This would get less pronounced by day 9, when the petals began to dry. They began to resemble bells.

Meanwhile, something strange happened to one of the flowers. Just one. In the center of the “eye”, which had been black on all six flowers, the entire field filled with yellow, backed with the same red color as the flower. It was startling.

The staring eye had dropped by the ninth day, but these two remained mostly upright. When I shot them together, and if you see them as eyes, the right one is cloudy, blind. If you see the one on the right as a face, it looks expressionless. Such a contrast between two of a kind.

After two weeks, these two finally started to droop like all the others, but they were all individuals throughout.

No two things are the same, nor would we want them to be. If all of these flowers, and if all of us, did the same exact thing in the same exact way, what would be the point? There are so many different things we can be. When it comes to beauty, similarity can only go so far before it loses its appeal. It is in diversity that we can see a myriad of beauty, and in each one of these flowers I saw something new, unique and exciting.

Death of a Flower – Sunflower

During the experimental stages of the Death of a Flower project, I chose as one of my subjects a set of Peruvian Lilies. They were highly colored, had very prominent and interesting stamens, and above all, they were pet friendly, so I could leave them out without worrying about the cat munching on them. However, the decay process with these flowers came in two stages:

Alive, with flowers intact.
Dead, with no remaining petals whatsoever.

About the most interesting picture I could have taken was a self-portrait of myself, sweeping up the floor from all the dead petals. So far the best successes I had were with flowers with strong stems, which could hold up the “face” of the flower long enough to get interesting shots before it totally wilted and collapsed. Thus, the decision to go to sunflowers next.

I got five in this group, and each one seemed to have a different personality. One was smaller than the rest, one already had some petals that were bending inward, and another was twisted upright. I was most excited about the upward-facing flower, because once wilting began, this one was most likely to hold its shape.

Upward-facing Sunflower, 15mm, 1/180 sec @f/9

Using the larger sunflowers as a subject allowed me to use my wide-angle Pentax 15mm f/4 lens on individual shots, which was another plus. I love this lens and the way it renders color. For the most part I used it and my 35 f/2.8 macro lens for every single shot.

Sunflower 2 — Sunflower #2, 35mm, 1/180 sec @f/3.2

The other good thing about using sunflowers in the summer was being able to keep them safely outside the house, and free of cat-related mishaps. For a week, I greeted the sunflowers on the porch on my way in from work, and everything was good, apart from one thing: on day 5, they looked exactly the way they did on day 1.

Then, on day 7, the smallest flower of the group changed dramatically. I don’t really know how or why this happened, but all of its petals shrank and hardened. The flower remained upright, which was perfect, exactly as I had hoped. The others had wilted slightly, too, but nothing in comparison to the small one. I took them back into the studio that night and got these shots:

Upright Sunflower, Day 7, 15mm, 1/180 sec @f/4

The upright sunflower had its petals curl up a bit, but its “head” remained lifted. The #3 sunflower had drooped forward, a sudden downcast expression.

Sunflower #3, Day 7, 35mm, 1/180 sec @f/4

But the highlight of the day was the small one, whose appearance had transformed into that of a wide-open eye:

The process of decay moved quickly. In another three days, all of the sunflowers’ petals had shrunk and hardened, and best of all, the strong stems were keeping the flowers anchored in place, with minimal wilting.

Sunflower #4, drooping — Sunflower #4, 15mm, 1/180 sec @f/8

My hope was that I could get some more human expressions from this set of flowers. Sadness is obvious, and most wilted flowers can present that quite easily. The “eye” flower, however, continued to give me a look of surprise. And a touch of the “What Was That” monster that was hiding in the trash compactor from Star Wars.

The most interesting shot of that day was of the #2 sunflower. Note the picture of this particular flower at the top of this post, taken from more of a side angle. For this shot, I took the camera off the tripod and shot it slightly from above, freehand, adding more of a tilt than a full-blown shot from the side. Despite the fact that this sunflower, like the others, had its petals dry up, they had done so in an interesting angle. The effect is an expression that is almost carefree, like someone with eyes closed feeling the wind in his or her face.

The Breeze, 35mm @f/5.6 — The Breeze, 35mm, 1/180 sec @f/5.6

At that point, I was convinced that I couldn’t take a better shot of these. I started in on another project, and these went back on the porch.

I went away for a few days, but rather than keeping the sunflowers on the porch, I left them in the studio. The “studio”, is a room in the basement below the porch, which as you can see from the group shot at the top, is a concrete-walled dungeonette with a tiny window. When I returned, the sunflowers had gone through another transformation, one that I had never expected. They had fully wilted. Any human expression I could get from them was one of dead-down resignation. But something new was added.

Strands of white, Day 24 — Cobwebs, Day 24, 35mm, 1/180 sec @f/6.3

All five of the flowers had been knitted together by cobwebs. I had to pull them apart in order to get individual shots of them. These two remained inseparable, and I didn’t want to extract them for fear of complete disintegration. Yet of all of these, the “eye” remained steadfast and mostly upright.

The Eye, covered in cobwebs, Day 24, 35mm, 1/180 sec @f/6.3

I’ve tried to repeat this process with other flowers, hoping to get these strands to return, to no avail. It made me wonder if I’m mistaken, and these are not cobwebs. Maybe something from the flowers themselves? I thought about it the whole time I took these shots.

The Breeze, Day 24, 35mm, 1/180 sec @f/4.5

When I had the camera in my hands, I thought of these strands as happy accidents, something random, a product of the sunflowers and time and positioning. As I look these shots over once again, I think of it more as a gift. It is not random, but something to be discovered, and marveled at, and enjoyed. I can’t help but smile when I see this shots, as dismal and creepy as they might first appear, because they are a product of a larger world.

This is part of a series which included as its subjects roses, irises, and hydrangeas.

The Death of a Flower: The Hydrangeas

It’s an odd feeling, getting flowers for the strict purpose of watching them decay, but by now, having watched a rose and an iris bite the dust, I was really getting into this new project. I walked in to the florist, feeling vaguely like a predator on the prowl, and carefully selected the new subjects.

What I chose was a group of hydrangeas, for a number of different reasons. For starters, I had never seen a dead hydrangea. They most often live in people’s gardens and spring back up each year. Also, there are so many groupings of small flowers, I wondered what would happen to them. Would they just wilt? Drop off?

I set up in the dungeon room in the basement on day 1 and took some shots. I was still getting used to my new Elinchrom flash heads and it went well over all, but these hydrangeas were so puffy and full it was hard to get all three in the same shot.

I tried again on Day 3. One of the hydrangeas had already started going downhill a bit, and I got my first glimpse of the inner workings of the flower. All of these wonderful purple veins began to appear, now visibly holding the blue and white blossoms. I had no concept of the intricate system that was created to give these flowers their shape, and now it was opening up to show me.

I realized it was a futile effort to try and get all three flowers in the same shot, so I transferred the individual flowers to their own vases. This is when things started to get really interesting. As the flowers drooped and the hairlines of each began to recede, they took on some strange, human quality.

One of the three in particular became a terrific subject for a portrait. I shot this one with the same care as you would shoot a person.

I realized later how great these flowers were for this project, because they didn’t just wilt and die, they transformed into something different. These hydrangeas became something new.

Already after a week, even in water, all three of the hydrangeas started to get decidedly crunchy. The leaves curled inward and were showing off their veins, just adding to the interest.

By now I had moved on to a set of Gerber Daisies, but I still kept the Hydrangeas around for test shots. One of my favorites of this latter group of shots I took was from a completely different angle. Somehow, and I don’t know if this just developed over time or whether it was like this to begin with, the stem of one of the flowers had magnificent curves to it, so I grabbed a few shots from up top to accentuate this effect.

The point of this project was never clearly defined to me until these particular flowers. Decay can be beautiful and that in part is what I set out to document, but that’s not where it begins or ends. A picture of a person on day 1 and a picture on day 17,000 can both be beautiful, and in completely different ways. We all recognize the beauty of a flower in its fullness, but once it goes past it’s prime, it gets tossed in the trash. But there’s something in every stage of life that is interesting, vital, and fascinating.

Here are the first few in the Death of a Flower series, the rose and the iris. Over the next few months I’ll be adding more to this series, including the Gerber Daisies, a couple of Proteas, Sunflowers, Ragusa Mums and Lilies.

The Death of a Flower: The Iris

After the first few shots with the roses, I moved on to a flower that was growing in our garden. One of the irises in the side yard had been knocked down by a storm, so we cut it away and put it in a vase. My original thought was to get shots with a very dark background, so I was waiting to take shots at night. I also had very little lighting, as I was still using the dorky little floor lamp I bought at Target rather than anything official and proper.

The results varied, but I found if I used my remote shutter and kept the camera on a tripod, I could manipulate the light to suit my purpose.

The above shot was on Day 5. This was probably my favorite of all the Iris shots I made using this method.

But then I decided that dangling a floor lamp with a bare 60-watt bulb wasn’t exactly the way to go about this. I also discovered that shooting in the dark could produce interesting results, but I couldn’t stop there.So I bought a couple of Elinchrom flash heads with softboxes to control the light better.

I also got the idea of escaping the living room to shoot in the strange recesses of our basement. We have a room at the front, underneath the porch, which looks like a good set for a horror movie. The iris was quite dead at this point, so it seemed like appropriate surroundings for a dead flower in a vase.

I kept the iris around far longer than I should have, until it got all wispy and fragile. I used it for test shots for a while before I got to my next subject, the hydrangeas. I continued to shoot in that odd basement room—and still do—with several other subjects, which I’ll share in the coming weeks. But here’s a test shot, taken about a month after I grabbed this one out of the garden, which may be the best shot I took that day.