Peonies are Pink

Late May in Ann Arbor means two things: 1) The grad students are settling into summer and 2) It’s peony watch time at the Arboretum. After a hectic semester in the lab, we welcomed the chance to sit down and get some research done without the distractions of seminars, office hours, grading, homework, classes, and 5 million emails every day. While we (finally) got some work done, the greyness of winter and spring slowly crept away, the temperatures inched upward, and plant life started to return to Ann Arbor. This year, thanks to an abnormally cool and rainy spring, the peonies were over a week late, but after multiple trips to the Arboretum, I eventually caught them in full bloom.

After all, what’s the point of having a fancy camera if you don’t go take fancy pictures with it? As an added bonus, this year it was cloudy and overcast on the day I visited during peak bloom, giving me great diffuse lighting. The first summer I spent in Ann Arbor, I accidentally showed up at the Arboretum after work one day when the peonies were in bloom. Because it was evening, the light was decent, but at that time I only had my point and shoot camera. Last year, I took my mother to see the peonies while she was visiting. We went in the middle of the afternoon, and it had been cloudy, but cleared soon after we arrived so that the garden was in full sunlight. Bad for the un-suncreened and photographers alike. I had my DSLR and got some okay pictures, but there were also a lot of blown out highlights and details hidden in shadows.

When I finally got my peony pictures this year, I came away with some shots that I’m pretty happy with. The lighting was good and I even got a few cool pictures where the background is blacked out but the peonies aren’t. Normally, to get this effect on purpose, you can use flashes to light your subject and use a fast shutter speed to only pick up light from the flash and not ambient light (explained here, used at a convention here). In this case, I semi-accidentally had this happen because the light-colored peonies in particular were still picking up a lot of indirect sunlight while the stalks behind them were not. This meant that the difference in exposure was significant (3 or 4 stops? More?) and exposing for the flowers left the background extremely underexposed and black. That’s your photography lesson for the day; the peonies are below: