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Color phantasy
For the first composition today I started with cornflowers on a lightbox. I always have liked cornflowers with their typical cornflower blue. With this composition I wanted to show different stages of cornflower development in one image.
Cornflowers © Julian Köpke I also liked very much the yellow of a craspedia globosa that Christa bought this morning. To bring out the colors I decided to install them in my „darkroom studio„. I made the image as a frame average of some 15 exposures, 3s each at f/16 and ISO 800.
Craspedia globosa © Julian Köpke I developed a combination of colours that the garden offered me with the craspedia globosa to create this picture, in which red, blue, yellow and green play a leading role.
Craspedia, cornflower and heucheria © Julian Köpke -
After the rain
Since days with an unsafe walk afflicted after an impact trauma with the head against a sloping roof in a Black Forest hotel last weekend I walk today after the first rain for weeks through our garden. Everything’s shines in rich colors under raindrops.
My first image is an attempt to capture two colors.
Physalis after the rain © Julian Köpke Warm and cold colors combined in these heucheria leaves.
Conflowers like stars within two colors.
Coneflower or Rudbeckia triloba © Julian Köpke -
Heucheria leaves
Backgrounds create a new image impression. Sometimes you need a background to add to the picture some more pizzazz. In these pictures I use the background to simulate a photographic base as I saw it in Karl Blossfeldt’s pictures.
The starting point is always a color image. With a background named „Aged Board“ the color image already shows an attractiveness of its own.
Heucheria leaf © Julian Köpke The Black & White conversion enhances the contrast a bit which is why I’m adding a little glow.
Heucheria leaf © Julian Köpke From another Heucheria leaf, which shone in a wonderful red, I show here only the black and white conversion with background. This makes the reproduction of its structure much better.
Heucheria leaf © Julian Köpke -
Heucheria leaf on a light box
So often I tried to image a Heucheria leaf. It doesn’t seem complicated. With less saturation the impression of a water color image emerges of a single leaf.
Heucheria leaf © Julian Köpke Going on with my Blossfeldt studies I need a background for this image. An image with background exerts a special charm. A paper structure fits well.
Heucheria leaf © Julian Köpke Only the conversion to black and white comes closer to the impression of a Blossfeldt macro.
Heucheria leaf © Julian Köpke -
Do you like Karl Blossfeldt ?
Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer who lived from 1865 to 1932. He didn’t think himself a photographer. With his studies of plant forms he made an enormous contribution to plant photography. Here is a nice wikipedia article about him.
He started to do photograms. Plants or parts of plants were placed directly on film or paper suitable for exposure. Exposure then takes place without any optics. Later he built himself a wooden camera, which reminds me of Andreas Feininger.
Black and white backlit macro images with a background can be similar to Blossfeldt’s images.
Silver leaf © Julian Köpke 
Heucheria in bloom © Julian Köpke 
Vetch © Julian Köpke 
Day lily © Julian Köpke
