A friend and I visited the Cherry Blossom Festival at Auburn Botanic Gardens, a beautiful annual celebration of spring and the fleeting spectacle of cherry blossom. There is something especially magical about these flowers—their delicate colour, short flowering season and sheer abundance can transform an ordinary garden into something almost dreamlike.
The only problem is that Mother Nature doesn’t always check her diary with the local council. On the day we visited, there were lots and lots of people, but not quite so many flowers. The trees were covered in buds, but the flowering season had been delayed by the cooler weather. What the festival lacked in blossom, it certainly made up for in crowds, so our photographic session was fairly short.
With the images I did manage to capture, I decided to play around and create a different feeling with each one.
The first has a mystical, almost magical quality, with layers of soft pink blossom drifting through the foreground and background. I wanted the sharply focused flowers to seem as though they were emerging from a veil of pink. It has an ethereal quality that I really love.
The second image is much cleaner and simpler. The soft green and earthy tones of the background provide a lovely contrast to the delicate pink blossoms, allowing the flowers to stand out without needing dramatic processing.
For the next image, I went in a completely different direction and created a high-key interpretation. The background was intentionally pushed towards white, with the pale pink petals becoming almost translucent and beginning to disappear into the light. I particularly like the way the stamens project from the flowers in profile, giving just enough fine detail to anchor such a delicate image.
The fourth image simply celebrates a beautiful cluster of blossom. I like the angle of the branch and the way the flowers seem to project forward into the frame, giving an otherwise simple composition a little movement and dimensionality.
Last but not least is the vertical image. It may not be the strongest photograph of the group, but it seemed appropriate to include at least one portrait orientation amongst all those landscapes. For this image I concentrated on the layers of flowers. I gave the most prominent blossom the greatest light, texture and definition, then gradually reduced each of those qualities as the flowers receded through the frame. The most distant blossoms were softened and slightly darkened so that they became part of the atmosphere rather than competing for attention.
The effect is subtle, but I really enjoy sculpting the different layers within an image, and flowers such as these provide a perfect canvas for that kind of experimentation.
So while Auburn may not have delivered the great sea of cherry blossom we had hoped for, it still provided an enjoyable opportunity to experiment with light, colour, depth and mood—and perhaps that was more interesting photographically than simply coming home with five variations of the same perfect pink tree.
And, of course, I also got to spend the day with a good friend and eat yummy Japanese pancakes, so all things considered, it was a pretty good day.
