From the Cutting Garden | Virginia Beach Garden Photography

This past winter, I attended a food photography and styling workshop.  One of the biggest take aways from the workshop instructor was that I was keeping my "sets" too tight.  Things were too controlled, too placed, too neat.  I know as well as anyone that life isn't neat and controlled, so of course it would make sense that by loosening up your "sets" your images would become more interesting, more dynamic, more relatable.

Last week I had a visit from the Plant Pop film crew and they wanted me to create a flower arrangement and photograph the arrangement.  They followed along as I gathered props, cut flowers from the garden, and began to assemble the bouquet.  As I created a flower arrangement, I stopped along the way, photographing the process.  I finished the bouquet, set in on the kitchen windowsill and took a few photographs of it.  The film crew followed me into my office, where I uploaded the images onto the computer, flipped through them in Lightroom and picked a favorite.  My favorite wasn't the final images that I created of the complete bouquet.  My favorite wasn't the images that I created during the process of building the arrangement.  My favorite, was simply the test photograph that I took, before I even trimmed the flowers to fit in the vase.  The flowers were scattered on the backdrop board in that messy yet neat way of having just set them down from my grip.  They had a sense of life, a texture that jumped out of the photograph, and a storytelling feel that the staged photographs just seemed to be missing.  I completed a quick process on the image, printed it out, and set it back on the prop board, as the film crew filmed in the background.  And with that final piece complete, the entire story came together in the image above.  The mess that remained from creating the flower arrangement, the just visible top of the bouquet in the vase, and the first photograph of the flowers as they had just come in from the garden.

In the messy moments between control we found the image we were seeking.