In Glorious Detail

Allium - In Glorious Detail

Allium - In Glorious Detail © 2012 Bo Mackison

Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.  ~ Gary Snyder

I have reached a lull in flowers. How is that possible? The peonies are not quite in bloom yet, the lilacs are gone. My perennial garden is full of foliage, but not a single flower has shown its colors though it is early to expect anything to be blooming in mid-May. I’ve seen a few iris in bloom, but only on private property. And so I reach back into my photo catalogs and pull out another allium photograph.

(I finally have my external hard drives back from the computer magician and they are in working order – yay!)

Couldn’t result pulling out the detail in this single allium, especially since the top flowers and the two largest flowers in the center of the florets were in focus, and so remained natural. The other florets took on an outlined effect. I love the overall wispy effect.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. Bo enjoys her large catalog of allium photographs as she discovers new ways to post-process this simple flower.

A Re-invention of Giant Allium

Eighteen Giant Allium

The Re-Invention of Allium © 2012 Bo Mackison

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larvae, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? . . . We are all shape-shifters and magical re-inventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.  ~ Diane Ackerman

Shape-shifters? Re-inventors? A caravan of selves?

We are not trapped inside one identity. One brand. We are always undergoing changes, some subtle, some life-altering. Sometimes we choose to change, though that seems to be a harder task. When I think of the many resolutions of change I have made and then discarded, I realize it is much easier to want the change than to live the change.

But I find it thrilling, addicting, fascinating to be a shape shifter, a re-inventor when it comes to photography. I focus on true to life landscape one day, then the next day I seem only able to create a garden of flowers seen only in my imagination until I shape shift them with the help of computer software. Perhaps tomorrow I will be discovering the macro world of a drop of water or the architectural intricacies of a barely standing centuries-old barn.

The garden filled with purple Allium that I photographed in the morning becomes a garden of pinks and yellows, drifting in the wind of change, in the afternoon, and the next morning these same Allium are just a whisper of their original selves, composed upon a background field of yellow and green stripes. I so love to examine a single type of flower, and then change it, following my whims and what-if’s, until the altered photograph appears and I know that is how it must look.

When I see a photograph, and I explode with a whoop of joy, then I know I am creating from deep within. Shape shifting. Re-inventing.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She creates with the camera and the computer.