Primula veris

• English: Cowslip
• Swedish: Gullviva
• Finnish: Kevätesikko

Cowslip is one flower I’ve been itching to have in my catalogue since last spring, so I’ve been busy searching for them in the past weeks. It’s not that rare, but the problem is that every single one of them seems to grow on the roadside in front of someone’s house and thus be out of my reach. The favoured location of the cowslip is not so surprising considering that it started out as a garden plant over here, but it has since found a foothold in the wild. I was getting desperate enough to start wondering if I should go and knock on someone’s door to ask if I could photograph the cowslips on their front yard, when I finally found a few of them growing on no man’s land – behind the church, no less, but on the outside of the cemetary wall. That was Thursday. This morning I set out with the gear to shoot my long desired flower. I was in for a shock – they had mowed the lawn and there was only one cowslip left, growing next to the rock fence! Well, nothing else to do than to photograph the remaining flower and contend with the dull splotchy stone wall as a background. It was so close that it didn’t help to shoot with the largest aperture, but I took what I got, at least I would get a new flower in my catalogue. Then it occured to me that I could actually get a profile shot if I put the camera right up against the wall, so I used the beanbag on the ground and rested the camera on it, trying not to scrape it against the rock. It would’ve been impossible to see anything in the viewfinder had it not been for the angle finder. From this angle, I suddenly didn’t have any problems whatsoever with the background, as it was a freshly cut lawn with the nearest trees at least 20 metres away. My awkward setup may have looked odd to the occasional passers-by, but I couldn’t have cared less – I finally had a keeper image of a cowslip!

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Image specs: ISO 200, f7.1, 1/800, Canon 300mm f4L w/ 31mm extension tube