Those beautiful Transvaal Daisies you see in the florist probably didn’t grow in soil if they were produced in California. They’re cultivated in a special hydroponic growing medium, wetted regularly with a nutrient solution, and kept in the perfect conditions inside a greenhouse. The result is spectacular, at least until the flowers are harvested for the cut flower trade.
These photos received standard processing… scroll down for their alter egos
Needless to say, this is a colorful dream, not a drought-happy landscape plant: they’ll survive with minimal water, but they will look dessicated and not flower well if at all. Those long stems only happen if the plants get ample water – with minimal water the flowers tend to appear under or in the leaves. There are landscape varieties that are more compact and easier to use, but they should either be grown as annuals, in a greenhouse, or in a mild winter area where they’ll be appreciated in a small, regularly watered hydrozone – or grown using hydroponic techniques.
I wonder if they could be grown using recovered shower heat-up water with nutrients added. The water could then be poured into a hydroponic reservoir and pumped through the plants in a cut flower garden for lots of summer color.
Beyond Reality: image transformation
Why play with alternate processing? To create a feeling, an illustration of the flowers that moves beyond strictly accurate representation. Perhaps to evoke the flowers as a memory, change the perception of when they were shot, eliminate the color to focus on their structure or prepare them for use in something more illustrative then representational.
The first set of images used normal processing. These don’t.
There’s nothing like a colorful subject, an iPhone and some post-processing software to create multiple versions of the same image. After basic processing in Lightroom, the images get duplicated and handed over to Exposure for a bit of fun. These images were “shot” on vintage “films”, transforming the iPhone into a film camera, at least virtually. This is a great thing for artistic illustration, maybe not so much for depicting what the flowers actually look like – although this depends on the film and the chosen effects. It’s easy to pick an old version of a film, add scratches, “age” the “paper” and play around without ever touching an enlarger or mixing baths of chemicals. Having worked with film in the old days, this is a lot of fun – since any process or technique you can imagine is available just by setting the desired parameters.