Courgette Flower
10 July 2010 · 19:29 · Canterbury, Kent
Courgettes are usually grown for the fruit, but the plant earns its container space several times over before any fruit appears. The leaves are large and lobed, silvery-marbled on the upper surface, and the stems carry the same fine bristling hairs that cover the flower buds — a surface that catches low-angle light in a particular way, each hair producing a small highlight, the whole plant acquiring an almost luminous quality in the late evening sun. The courgettes here were planted in a large container partly for decoration rather than yield, which is a rational arrangement: the plant as an ornamental object, the fruit as a bonus rather than the point.
At 19:29 on a July evening, the sunlight was coming in low from the west and catching a corner of the garden that was otherwise in partial shade. The yellow flower buds — closed, not yet open, the petals still fused into the elongated form that precedes the open trumpet of a courgette flower — were directly in the light while the leaves behind them had already moved into shadow. In a colour photograph this would have read as yellow against green and dark-green: vivid but perhaps slightly obvious. The monochrome conversion reassigned those relationships according to luminosity rather than hue. Yellow, being a high-luminosity colour, mapped to near-white; the greens of the leaves, considerably darker in tonal value, fell towards the lower half of the grey scale. The result is that the flower buds appear to glow — to emit light rather than reflect it — in a way that the colour original would not have suggested.
The ribbed structure of the petals is visible through the closed bud, the longitudinal ridges pressed against each other and catching the raking light along their surfaces. The fine hairs that cover the exterior are individually resolvable, particularly along the edges of the buds where they extend into the lighter areas of the frame. The larger bud on the left is slightly further open than the one behind it on the right, the petals beginning to separate at the tip. In the lower half of the frame, below the cluster, a courgette leaf catches enough reflected light to show its own texture before disappearing into the darkness at the edges.
The title is simple rather than descriptive. What the image actually looks like — given the monochrome rendering, the luminous foreground against near-black background, the vertical elongated forms — is perhaps less like a garden photograph and more like something from a Victorian natural history plate, where the draughtsman's job was to make the unfamiliar biology of a plant legible to a reader who might never have seen one.
Canon PowerShot S90 · 6.85mm · f/3.5 · 1/80s · ISO 400
The PowerShot S90, released by Canon in 2009, used a 10-megapixel 1/1.7" sensor behind a 28–105mm equivalent zoom beginning at f/2.0 at wide end — the fast aperture that distinguished it from Canon's more consumer-oriented compacts of the period. The S90 used a rotating control ring around the lens barrel, a design retained in its successor, the S95, and was Canon's first compact camera capable of shooting RAW files. The S95 was introduced the following year with marginal specification improvements; the two cameras are substantially the same in output and handling.
