I’m not gonna lie. It’s been a frustrating spring.
After the winter that never ended, all I’ve wanted for months was to photograph light and delicate things- tulle and petals, pink and green, bare feet and soft grass. I was especially excited for flowers. There would be daffodils, magnolias, bluets, azaleas, apple blossoms, rhododendron, lily of the valley… and I would photograph every single one.
Except the flowers didn’t come on time. The warm weather never seemed to stick. By the end of the first week of May, there were still no leaves on the trees, but four of my flower-centric shoots had come and gone. With too busy a schedule for any leeway, I had to accept the fact that my vision of a pretty girl engulfed in white apple blossom petals would have to wait until next year to be recorded by my camera.
And that’s a hard lesson to learn, especially when you have to meet expectations and shoot anyway.
Case in point- this shoot with Adobuere at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. In some ways, it was the shoot that never happened. Originally scheduled as a sort of pinup factory shoot for mid-February and cancelled more than once for wind chills well into negative degrees, it seemed prudent to take advantage of our long wait and exploit early May’s naturally saturated glory. Instead, what we got was a cold, rainy day, skunk cabbage, a couple azaleas and one forsythia that looked like it had just exploded in hopes of starting a trend.
Still, I’m happy with the results, which came after a somewhat uncomfortable conversation I had with myself upon arriving- figure it out– I said. You’re not good enough to get to claim it was the weather’s fault.
I don’t know that I did figure it out, but I didn’t give up. As in all things, sometimes we need to just deal with what we’ve got. But if you can make something beautiful out of it, you’re probably doing something right. At least when it come’s to photography, there’s Photoshop to help spruce things up a bit after the fact.
All that said, the weather has definitely been looking up. I do think I missed the apple blossoms, mostly because I have too many projects to squeeze in anything more. I have every intention of not only getting that shot next year, but making it amazing. By then, maybe I’ll have figured out how to wait for the weather to catch up with my imagination.
Until next time
***** Kayt