The Story Behind My Photography Series "Petals"

The other night I woke up at 02.00 and just couldn’t fall back asleep because my brain was just BURSTING with ideas. I’m not going to share all of them with you here, because I kind of feel like I need to work a little bit more on them before I expose them to the world. But anyway, one idea was so simple and fantastic that I had to take action as soon as I woke up again later that morning.

That idea had come to mind thanks to the magnificent peonies in our garden. I just love the swirling movements of the petals, and I realised that applying some heavy editing on closeup pictures of that could yield some fantastic results. I actually had to use my old camera as I don’t have anything that really works as a macro lens for the new one, but it worked anyway!

Here is an example of the finished work, followed by the unedited version. I think they’re both pretty in their own ways, but I wanted to make the abstract feel of it stronger and make it feel like it might be a picture of a flower, but it doesn’t 100% look like it! I think I’m going to experiment further with these raw images.  I’m thinking that maybe inverting them would be a cool way to make them into something completely different, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Now on to the other ideas I had. I also think I’m going to take a lot more pictures of the peonies while they’re in bloom, so I have a good batch of images for the rest of the year. Hehe.