Dahlia

I take a lot of flower photos. Some of them bore me in camera, so I don’t finish them. Others I like, but they just don’t work in post-processing. Every now and then there is one that thrills me the whole way through. This dahlia is one of those.

It was something about the pose (which I didn’t adjust at all) and the way the sun came in and lit up that ring of yellow against the pink. It was all such a nice surprise, because I couldn’t see what the camera recorded when I looked through the viewfinder.

I’ve read that some photographers say they photograph things to find out what they look like through the camera. I completely understood that on this particular afternoon.

Whatever happened in those few moments after I pressed the shutter seemed like a little bit of magic. When I looked at the back of the camera, what I saw was exactly what I wanted, but also more than I had hoped for. It was like life had sent me a message in picture form.

The funny thing is, the final image doesn’t look like what I saw on the back of the camera. Nobody else would want to see that. Instead, I had to translate and refine the message before it was ready to pass on to anybody else.

The current image is more a reflection of the whole experience than what the camera recorded.