Jun 6
Orchid jungle
While most people are busy complaining about the weather, I’m busy photographing. A little bit of rain, overcast, almost no wind, and cool – I couldn’t really ask for more, it’s as perfect as it gets for flower photography. The biggest problem is that the prime flower season hasn’t started yet… but it’s not like we don’t have any flowers, so no worries.
The first order of the day was to see how the bird’s eye primroses (Primula farinosa) were doing. We have the privilege of having the only known location for these pink primroses in Hälsingland, so although not a rare flower as such, it’s certainly very special up here. The flower is on the decline because of modern farming methods, ideally it needs grazing animals like cows to keep the grasses under control but of course these days hardly anyone lets their cows out “in the wild”. So for the lack of cows, somebody decided mow the grass and this seems to have helped – the flower was growing in large numbers, certainly plenty more than last year anyway. I didn’t have any good bird’s eye primrose pictures so I was able to remedy that, although I’m still not entirely happy.
Later in the day I visited the lady’s slippers again. I wanted to improve the “baby slipper” picture from Thursday, and I think this one works better.
You’d think that two days doesn’t make much difference, and in the case of the slippers maybe it doesn’t… but I was surprised to see fragrant orchid buds coming up seemingly everywhere. So when I settled down to photograph the slippers, not only did I have to watch out for the twayblade that are easy to see thanks to the leaves, but now the fragile fragrant orchids were also forcing me to come up with weird positions so I would do as little damage as possible. It’s not easy I can tell you… no matter how careful I was, I always found some poor plant squashed under my boot. There is so much going on in this location that I could go there every day and always find something new to photograph, but this fear of destroying the orchids will keep me out. Maybe in 1-2 weeks when the fragrant orchids are in bloom…
1 comment
Well, I’m complaining about the weather
) It’s cold, windy and rainy here – what more do you need to ruin your shooting experience.. Nice to see that you have done good job with your camera 
This new version of slipper definitely works better than 1st!