Florascape Lightbox

About the “Florascape” Images

My love of nature, and my desire to explore new and different subjects, brought me to photograph flowers. But I still like to see my photographs in the “landscape” context.

I also love to work on my computer, and I have been using Adobe Photoshop for 20 years, playing with my landscape images to improve them far beyond what I could do in the darkroom. I came upon a procedure that would “morph” the flower image into a landscape-like image, with a foreground, distance and even a sky above - thus began the creation of the “Florascapes Series”.

The image below demonstrates the "Florascape" before and after imagery. 

The flower petals are unmistakable, but they are seen as a world of their own, as if you could walk into the flower and explore their textures and colors up close. I then added more complexity to the process…

It is important to me to retain a three-dimensionality about the image, and show realistic textures to the petals. There is a foreground, a subject, and a background in the images, completing the “landscape”. I am also expanding the original Florascape idea, adding reflection and sky elements that allow the concept to evolve.

With more exploration, I was able to create fantastic abstract images from the flower photographs. Some look like fountains and others like masked faces. With my love of science fiction I eventually created alien worlds and planets from the flowers. Imagination and exploration can truly bring discovery and originality.

I believe that it is up to the viewer to decide what the images mean and what feelings they evoke. I present this explanation of these unique images not to direct or influence the response, but to describe how the idea came to me, and how the images were developed.

I hope that you enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed creating them!