The Story Behind the Image - Orange Daylily

This flower image is packed with meaning for me. It’s just a simple flower but it has a story. And that story is what inspired me to create this image.

The story

My dad was an avid gardener. He had a green thumb for and sadly I did not inherit that trait! He grew mostly vegetables but also some flowers. It seemed that every year, the outdoor vegetable garden got bigger and we had more vegetables than we could eat! I remember going around our block with brown paper bags full of zucchini and tomatoes giving them away to our neighbors.

In the front of our house, he planted Daylily bulbs. Every year, they’d sprout up and there’d be more of them than the year before. They were such beautiful bursts of orange color in our green yard.

When the time came to sell our family home, we dug up some of the Daylilies and we brought them to our own home. My sister took some plants too and we both have a piece of our dad’s garden right in our own yards. I love it when they bloom each year – usually in late June or early July.

The technique

I do have lots of photos of these beauties but this one is my favorite (to date!). To get this photo I did a few things:

• Used my Canon DSLR camera with a shallow depth of field setting. A cell phone would work also using portrait mode to get the bit of blur in the background.
• Crouched down and got under the bloom.
• Looked up through the flower and to the sky – to get the bright blue of the sky in the background to contrast with the orange of the flower.
• Filled the image with the flower – from left to right and top to bottom.
• Edited the resulting photo using Adobe Lightroom to sharpen it up and to slightly saturate the colors. I also used Topaz Labs Studio to add texture.
• Flipped it vertically just because I like having the flower tilt up to the right of the frame.

Here you can see the ‘straight out of the camera’ before image - a pretty, soft image on its own - and the final edited version.

Before

After

 Do flowers have a special meaning for you?

Do you seek them out to photograph them? Do you take pictures whenever you just happen to see them? Some flowers have a story in our lives and having photos of them reminds us of those memories. I’d love to hear about your special flower stories!

If you’d like to see this image on products, check out my online shop.  Would you like to get your photos into a print on demand shop like my online shop? Let me know and I'll add that to my blog topics list!