In one part of my wife’s garden she is growing dahlias:
The colours of some of these flowers has been stunning. What I wanted to do for this set of photographs is to show them in the garden setting with natural light rather than take them into a ‘studio’ environment. This did prove to be a little problematic due to the weather we are experiencing in the UK (although we are not getting the extreme weather other parts of the UK are having).
I did, though, have to choose the moment between showers when there was sufficient light and little wind. This close up even the slightest breeze was causing the blooms to move around so I did spend some time just waiting for a lull in the wind to take the photographs – this lull was typically around 2-3 seconds so I had to be quick.
The first photo shown above is of a stunning pink dahlia. How the pink shows on your monitor does depend on the quality and settings of your set-up. The water drops you can see on the petals are those formed by the rain – I hate it when photographers use a garden spray to put water droplets on flowers.
This next image is a study of a bright orange bloom taken a little closer in to show the texture in the petals. The colour of this bloom was just amazing – I hope your monitor does it justice.
This next one is of a dark red dahlia – I have had to lighten it a bit otherwise it would just show as an almost black blob. You can see that the foliage in the background is lighter than that in the other photos.
In this final image I am showing a pale yellow flower that fades to cream but has a slight pink touch to the petals around the perimeter. The colours here are more subtle than in the previous images, but this is still a beautiful bloom.
One problem with this colour is that many of the farmers fields around these parts are used for growing oilseed rape (a member of the cabbage family) which has yellow flowers which attracts pollen beetles. Although this year has not been so bad, there is still enough around to spoil these flowers. This bloom I caught before it got infested – a day later and the centre of it was covered with these tiny black beetles. look closely and you can see a couple on the flower.
The full set of these can be seen in the garden gallery.