A.D. Drumm Images, LLC – Landscape, Portrait, and Fine Art Photography in Rochester MN Photography

September 11, 2015

SMNPPA and the Gladiolas

Filed under: General photography — Tony Drumm @ 3:19 pm

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I belong to a local professional photographers group, Southern Minnesota Professional Photographers Association, or SMNPPA for short. We’re affiliated with the larger Minnesota PPA and the Professional Photographers of America. It exists for promoting networking with other professional photographers as well as providing education opportunities for its members.

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We meet once a month, usually having a speaker providing instruction in some aspect of photography or business or marketing or some combination of the above. Some of our speakers are local, but we also often bring in folks from quite distant parts of the country. It’s a great organization and quite a deal for what you get – in case any of my readers is also shooting professionally.

One of our members and director of programs, Heather, has parents who plant over four acres of gladiolas on their farm near Potsdam, MN. She had the great idea to take the opportunity to have one of our meetings at the farm when the flowers were in bloom.

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For this meeting, we had a couple short talks covering macro (close-up) photography and environmental portraiture. Then, we were out to the field to shoot.

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Most of our meetings don’t include shooting, although we usually have one all-day meeting with some shooting in the summer. This meeting was different having the short instruction time and the rest of the evening photographing around the glads. The weather was great and as the sun moved lower in the sky, the light became very nice.

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I brought extension tubes to shoot a few close-ups of the flowers, experimenting a bit with a couple techniques. There was a bit of a breeze early, but it calmed down nicely for us making the macro shooting a little easier.

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Heather lined up three models for us, so I took Barret over by some of the red flowers and took a few photos as the sun was setting.

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As I was looking around, I happened to see the sky come to life away from the sun. My favorite sky color – I call it a magenta sky – highlighted some high thin clouds. (See my post about my Grand Canyon visit to see one of my favorite photos of the canyon with this same magenta-colored sky.)

I knew this would last just minutes. It was “oh! oh! where can we shoot??? Now!!” I found a stand of flowers to pose Barret by, sat on the ground and fired away. It was then that I noticed the gladiolas she was standing next to had colors so similar to those above her. What more could I ask for?

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And sure enough, the clouds soon went dark. Heather and a few others shot a some final photos of the models with the waning light in the west behind them to finish up the evening. The three young women were good sports – the temperature was dropping and the mosquitoes were biting.

We wrapped up and headed to a local tavern for dinner and drinks. Heather’s folks donate many flowers to St. Mary’s hospital (part of the Mayo system) and other organizations. They’ve been in the news several times – recently here – and now I’ve been able to see and wander through the awesome acres of glads. I also had a chance to talk to her father, John, about what goes into it. It was fascinating and great to feel his passion for it.

Those of us drawn to photography understand how that sort of passion works. And why we can spend hours talking about it.

1 Comment »

  1. We enjoyed having your group in our gladiolus. John says there were a few mosquitoes but the bugs were corn root worm beetles which move to gladiolus when there is no silk on the corn fields next to the glads.

    Comment by Barb Meyer — September 12, 2015 @ 6:22 am

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