Just outside one of the main buildings on the Oklahoma State University campus is a row of Genti White Clustered Bellflowers which, for most of the year, are large, stately, and decidedly green—or brown, depending on what season. But for a brief period of time each spring they come to life with blinding brilliance, a curtain of white that shines so brightly in the midday sun it almost hurts to look at them. My wife, who is a faculty member at OSU, remarks on them each year as she goes from one building to the next between classes. When the two of us met up one morning to go for a short walk she mentioned to me that these white flowers were blooming, so later that day I grabbed my camera and went to see if I could capture a shot of them.
The most challenging part of creating this image was deciding how to adequately convey the sheer sense of scale on display, and I’m not sure how well I did it. These flowers bloom high above the heads of the college students passing by, stretch on for the entire length of the building. I could have stood way back and took a picture of the entire scene, but that wouldn’t have been, in my opinion, nearly as impactful as what you see here. I would have been just a fairly normal scene of a brick building with some white flowering bushes in front, and students walking by. I don’t think, though I could be wrong, it would have done a great job of conveying a sense of scale.
What I chose to do instead was focus on a single protruding collection of the tiny white flowers and use that as the main subject of the image, but compose the shot in such a way that several other flowers were visible in the background, while also positioning myself so that a few were also showing in the foreground. The result, at least in my opinion, does a pretty decent job of illustrating the scene without showing a whole lot. I’m not sure if it worked exactly how I had hoped, but it did present a fun challenge and I’m glad my wife mentioned it to me and encouraged me to give it a try :)
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