Reference Photo Season

Reference photo season has officially begun. This means I will have more photos of flowers and plants than I do of my children every month until it snows again.

I have started things off with a trip to St. George, Utah. It is both a fun place to bring kids, and to hunt for wildflowers. We were a bit early for most flowers, but the paintbrush were in full bloom!

My next trip is in the planning stages, but I am hoping to head to Kanab in June to get references for another Endangered Species painting.

When I take Photos, I get many. And I mean many. I get ones showing the whole plant so I know what it’s growing habit it ( is it upright, arching, winding up something else, etc?) and close ups of each aspect of the plant, the flowers, the inside of the flowers, how the flowers connect to the rest of the plant, the leaves, the undersides of the leaves, the stems and branches, and fruit or seeds if they are present. I make sure to include something to help me understand the scale of the plant. If I think about it ahead of time, I bring a white board with a grid on it. the squares are 1 inch by 1 inch, so when I take a photo of a flower with it in the backfground, I can not only focus my camera on the flower, but can see how big everything is and get a good idea of what color it is compared to the white of the background. I even get a 360 video of the plant just in case I missed something.