Another Beginning
In my “About This Column” page I noted that everything we create must have a beginning. The photograph shown here marked the beginning of what I think of as a new approach to nature photography for me. The date was May 3, 2000, and the place was Round Rock, a rapidly growing city north of Austin. I was in a field on one side of a cul-de-sac, a bit of prairie that members of the Native Plant Society of Texas had taught me was a good place to see lots of native species. That day I’d gone there alone so I could take my time photographing (other people understandably get impatient if I spend fifteen minutes or half an hour in the same spot, as I often do when I take pictures).
I was pleased to find a colony of basket-flowers, Centaurea americana, growing in the field, but they weren’t far from the road that had brought me there (which has since been expanded to a superhighway). In order to keep the road and the apartments across the way from ruining my picture, I leaned down so that my eyes would be closer to the level of the flowers. Not good enough: I could still see distracting things in the background. I ended up lying flat on the ground—a skin-threatening thing to do in Texas—and looking up at a single basket-flower so I could isolate it against the sky. The result was the picture you see here, which has become my best-known photograph. A view from this angle makes it clear why Anglo settlers called this a basket-flower.
© 2011 Steven Schwartzman
(Here is information about Centaurea americana, including a map showing where the species grows.)
I love this one, Steve. Just beautiful!
Nikki Smith
June 8, 2011 at 12:54 PM
Thanks, Nikki. I’m glad you found it beautiful.
wordconnections
June 8, 2011 at 1:52 PM
What a pretty plant! A remarkable photograph!
montucky
June 15, 2011 at 1:14 AM
Thank you: it was my “breakthrough” in photographing wildflowers.
wordconnections
June 15, 2011 at 7:39 AM
[…] is the two-month anniversary* of this blog’s first post, so I had the idea, number-nurturer that I am, of looking back to see what I’d photographed […]
Seeds and fibers « Portraits of Wildflowers
August 4, 2011 at 5:45 AM
[…] marks three months since Another Beginning appeared as the first article in this Portraits of Wildflowers blog. I hope you’ll join me in […]
Snow at the end of August « Portraits of Wildflowers
September 4, 2011 at 11:06 AM
[…] end of Meister Lane in Round Rock, the same place where (again, a decade ago) I took the picture of the basket-flower that appeared as this blog’s first photograph. The northern border of the lot has expanded […]
Liatris on the prairie « Portraits of Wildflowers
September 23, 2011 at 6:15 AM
Very nice! I’ve tried also to shoot some flowers with the sky as their background and here my results:
http://godslover.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/weekly-photo-challenge-wrong/
But obviously mine is not as good as yours. 🙂
Inge
December 17, 2012 at 11:26 PM
One thing you can try if the sky comes out too bright is use flash fill and a shorter exposure.
Steve Schwartzman
December 18, 2012 at 7:01 AM
[…] one post a day since June 6, 2011. I’d started priming the pump a couple of days earlier with one venerable photograph, then skipped a day and continued priming on June 6th with three more posts. The following day I […]
Three years | Portraits of Wildflowers
June 6, 2014 at 5:31 AM
It’s gorgeous. What a great, nay magnificent, photo to start with.
Gallivanta
June 6, 2014 at 5:51 AM
I’m pleased that you like this early bit of photographic gallivanting among the wildflowers. By coincidence I revisited that plot of land last week. In recent years it has been rather heavily mowed, but last week I found a fair number of wildflowers (along with some aggressive non-native species, alas), so I stayed a while and took a bunch of pictures. There were some basket-flowers, too, descendants of the colony that included the one shown above. Then I went on to a much denser and larger basket-flower colony half a mile to the east, where I took many more photographs.
Steve Schwartzman
June 6, 2014 at 6:17 AM
And we will see these photos one day soon?
Gallivanta
June 6, 2014 at 8:13 AM
Certainly, but not as soon as I’d like or you might expect. That’s because I’m planning to do an unprecedented three weeks of posts based on a single field trip I went on near the end of April. Things will get more out of sync than they already are, but c’est la vie.
Steve Schwartzman
June 6, 2014 at 8:59 AM
🙂
Gallivanta
June 6, 2014 at 10:56 PM
[…] I thought I’d close by linking to a post in which I showed a leafhopper, but when I searched I discovered I’ve never shown one. To remedy that, here’s a leafhopper on a mesquite pod in northeast Austin on June 3, 2011. (It just dawned on me that that was one day before my first post on this blog.) […]
What I found on a spiderwort leaf | Portraits of Wildflowers
March 23, 2016 at 5:02 AM
Well, now I can say I was an early adopter. Of course, I like this image and viewpoint. It reminds me of some other image I have seen, but I cannot recall which.
Steve Gingold
March 23, 2016 at 5:14 AM
We can share our early-adopter-ness.
In the years since I took this picture I’ve created other versions of it with newer cameras, and of course the sky and lighting are never the same either. Here, for example, is a take from 2013:
https://portraitsofwildflowers.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/basket-flower-from-below/
Steve Schwartzman
March 23, 2016 at 7:57 AM
[…] June 4, 2011, the first post in Portraits of Wildflowers went up. In commemoration, here’s one picture from each June in […]
Eight years | Portraits of Wildflowers
June 4, 2019 at 2:44 AM
[…] a soft cloud beyond it. On May 10th of this year I drove to the site in Round Rock where I made that important portrait and was relieved to find basket-flowers and others still flourishing there on the Blackland […]
Nine years | Portraits of Wildflowers
June 4, 2020 at 4:25 AM
[…] end of Meister Lane in Round Rock, the same place where (again, a decade ago) I took the picture of the basket-flower that appeared as this blog’s first photograph. The northern border of the lot has expanded […]
Liatris on the prairie | Portraits of Wildflowers
November 18, 2020 at 8:37 AM