Dogwoods

I love dogwoods. The color of their blooms are bright. The individual flowers have a great, strong shape with beautiful detail, especially the pink blooms. The trees typically look very balanced and clean, not messy.

But photographing them can be a challenge. As I was working a grove of dogwoods and I was constantly thinking about what the final image would look like and what feeling it would have. Shooting the trees from a distance would require a very unique composition or else it would look mundane and boring. Shooting the petals up close is always a challenge with flowering trees because getting a clean image without a mess of branches, leaves, and flowers is tough. I could always break off a branch and do a clean shot with a nice blurred background, and that would have been OK, but I also liked, in some way, having the tree involved.

I made a few nice images, one of them below. It is a fairly simple composition, with the large tree behind the pink dogwood providing some contrast for the pink flowers. It is not a perfect shot, but when I make a print of it I think it will hold its own hanging on the wall.