Floral inspirations

On a suggestion from my tutor, Dave, I looked at Robert Mapplethorpe's work with flowers. Using them in very simple compositions, he examined the structure and form of flowers and made some spectacular images with them. 
  

It's interesting how he used monochrome in some images, which I've often maintained is a great device to hone in on specific visual elements; in street photography and reportage shooting, it's great to emphasise the elements of drama or activity in a scene, in landscape photography it tends to draw your attention to the texture and detail of the shot and in still life shooting can assist in focussing on form. 

I chose simple compositions, using a single flower as the subject and shot both using natural light in my kitchen and lounge. The tulip shots were taken in the lounge using natural light which is stronger than in the north facing kitchen. 
 

The gerbera and cup shots were taken in the kitchen and I replicated these shots in the studio. Although I love the light in my kitchen, it's very often not strong enough to produce a good quality image and these were shot with ISO2000, f1.8 at 1/60s in order to get the image to register. 
 

The studio shots were far more successful in this instance as the clarity of light lent itself to capturing the simplicity of the overall composition. It also afforded me the opportunity to examine the textures of the flower and the cup, although it didn't immediately occur to me to make monochrome studies; I really rather liked the red and white against the black background. But, for the sake of research I wanted to see how the image looked in monochrome:


Black and white certainly works well in the tulip shots taken in my lounge the gerbera shots weren't as powerful once their colour had been removed. They're quite flat as a structure and although the petals are interesting, they don't hold enough 3 dimensional structure to withstand the reductive effect of monochrome.