Just when you thought you’d seen the last hepatica picture! Well I thought I’d taken my last hepatica picture (for the year) until I saw a bunch of them, radiating their colour from under the branches of a spruce. The flowers were big and the colour was very strong, not a pale flower in the bunch unlike the hepatica behind my garage which all seem to be small and pale (some of to the point of being white). But what really attracted me about these hepatica was the way they were growing between the brances of the spruce. A great opportunity to show some environment of the flower, it’s not what I normally do because it’s very difficult to create a simple composition when you include some background in it. And me, I like simple compositions! What helped me with these pictures was the patchy light so I could let some parts of the picture be generously underexposed to reduce the distractions.

Another thing I was able to do that hasn’t really worked for me before was to include the leaf in the composition. Granted, I had to do a lot of coaxing to get this flower positioned the way it is because the flowers are normally much taller than the leaves, but I got the idea for it when I saw another flower resting on the leaf so I just needed to set up a more photogenic pair. No flowers were harmed in the process!