B&W Retrospective: Raindrops on Plants

As is often the case in life, one must stop sometimes and reflect on the past to determine how best to proceed with the business of living. The same is true in photography. Today we will look back into the recent past to gather some images for collective inspection. This retrospective considers that "into each life, some rain must fall." With luck, it can also be pleasing to the eye.



I have been studying so-called "fine art" photography on the web and trying to see what sorts of things that people put into this category. The two criteria that I find to be reasonably universal are 1) it is B&W, and 2) the composition is simple with clean lines. These photos are my attempt to find a little of this sort of stuff in my macro images.

In almost all of these images, the star performer is the collection of waterdrops and the plant is simply the canvas. To be sure, the canvas adds a good bit to the composition, but the point is the water. The only possible exception is the one above where the flower itself really dominates the view.

The Lady's Mantle makes an especially good canvas for this sort of photography. The contrast between the clearly fuzzy leaf and the shiny, bright water drops brings the image to life and give it some depth.

This violet blossom is well drenched in rain and the collections of droplets all lead the eye to the center of the flower.

The bedewed stalk leads the eye to a pleasantly blurred background. Much like some much of our lives. The foreground is well focused (most of the time) but the more distant objectives are blurred out. In real life, we seldom think/remember in monochrome, but rather in color. Those images are, for me at least, typically in a kind of mental watercolor. With soft pastels, not stark primary colors, animating the scene. Here, the monochrome helps abstract the object just enough so that you can step back and not only see the plant and the water drops but also see the design and balance of the composition.

With that exposition, I'll conclude here on another shot of the Lady's Mantle. This is one of the more "fine art-y" sort of images here. The edge of the leaf draws a dramatic line across the image and the water drops are few enhancing their relative importance. Although it is simple, there is much to see here and I find that I can look at this one for a while without getting bored.

Maybe that is the real criterion for fine art photography...it isn't boring to look at.