The Trouble With Trillium

This past weekend, I made an early morning trip to Cougar Mountain, the Wilderness Creek trail in particular (I explored a couple others, ultimately, but all of my pictures came from the former). Spring has sprung, with even some trillium flowers beginning to pop up! The majority have not, but a few are brightening the forest. They were joined in a few places by some sort of yellow violet, with maroon lines on the petals (unfortunately, no pictures turned out).

I actually found it quite difficult to take satisfactory pictures of the trillium flowers, despite their seemingly very picturesque qualities. The troubles were twofold as follows.

• Technical: The trillium flowers all fell in my tripod coverage's gap. I have a small tripod that's only a few inches high, and a large tripod that ranges from about six feet down to about one foot. The trillium flowers were taller than my small tripod, and too short to photograph with my large tripod (at least with the compositions I had in mind - none of the flowers that morning lent themselves well to a birds-eye-view perspective). The first shot I am posting I took with my small tripod, but with the legs bunched together to add height. The second shot  was handheld. In both cases, I lost the tripod stability that I prefer, thus losing some sharpness. To bump up shutter speed, had to boot up the ISO to 500, which adds some noise, and underexpose slightly, which worsens that problem.

• Compositional: Careful readers of this blog will remember my discussion of the difficulties with flower portraits. How do you place the flower either in an interesting context or present it in a compelling way, that's not just a flat picture of the flower? Context was hard with the trilliums, as the forest floor was still rather brown and cluttered, and the trees were sunlit and thus too contrasty. Also, trillium flowers are so perfectly shaped - with three nearly identical petals immediately above three nearly identical leaves - that they are hard to present in a manner more interesting than a straight-on, top-down shot.

By far my most interesting composition of the morning was of an opening trillium, with the two leaves in the background cradling the bud (this was the only flower I saw that morning that had its leaves arranged in this way). It's not as sharp as I prefer, but I think it might be adequate, and anyway, it's an interesting composition. Dost ask which aperture I used? F/4.5. I started with a narrower aperture, because I wanted more detail in the bud, but this cluttered up the background too much.

This next was the best of my trillium portraits, both compositionally and technically in terms of sharpness. Since I wasn't directly in front of the plant, and since the flower came out diagonally a bit relative to the leaves, the photograph has a side perspective and off-center subject placement that I've found difficult to do convincingly with other trillium shots.

Happy April! Until next time...