Magnolia – Spring flowers with a Hasselblad and two Leicas

There are certain subjects I find myself shooting over and over again, usually because they are a point of interest in some daily or frequent ritual activity.  When I’m in Brooklyn, I have many photos of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, because they dominate the view whenever I go out to walk the dog or pick up a coffee.  Many of them are pretty similar compositions, but there are interesting differences based on time of day and time of year, weather and light conditions, river traffic, and the activities of people and animals enjoying the waterfront.  At our house in Westchester, the centerpiece of our front yard in early spring is a large pink magnolia tree.  It’s the first tree to flower and on a good year it will be chock full of gorgeous large flowers for about a fortnight.

As the tree is rather convenient to our driveway, I ended up taking a fair few photos of it in various stages of flowering as I was heading out with a loaded camera to shoot something else.  Most of these frames are a shot or two at the beginning or the end of a roll.  “Life is what happens when you are making other plans” and after a while I noticed I had built a little time study of the various stages of flowering without setting out to do so.

This is the first shot I noticed from my Lightroom Library.  I was testing out a Leica R6.2 on a 35mm Summicron that my son is loaning to me, shooting with some HP5 I had on hand.  Shooting on an SLR was a new and different experience for me after spending 7-8 months on either a Leica Rangefinder or a Hasselblad with a waist lever finder.  I was pleased with the R6.2 and the R glass is very good, and imagine I’ll be trying it out more in the coming months.

I love the mood of this shot from a rainy day, just as the blossoms are starting to emerge and show their color.  This was shot with the Leica M3 as we were heading to an art opening in Garrison, NY across the river from West Point.

This is a shot taken on the Hasselblad a few days later as the flowers are starting to open.  My 80mm was in the shop getting a CLA because of an unfortunate drop, so I was interested to see how the 60mm looked with a shallow depth of field.  Pretty good, I think…

I have been doing an extended series of shoots to explore different B&W stocks and on this day, I was trying out Rollei 25 RPX.  I liked the light on the blossoms and am very pleased with the quality of the flowers on B&W.

I’ve been pretty impressed with the Rollei stocks and think I’ll be using them again going forward.

As the rest of our garden was starting to flower, I started to actually focus on shooting the flowers instead of grabbing a shot or two on the way to something else.  This is around the peak of the season for the magnolia and the tree was brimming with gorgeous flowers.

I thought this would be a good application for the Dual Range attachment on my Summicron 50mm to get closer to the flowers, and I was not disappointed with the results!

As you can see from this ultra close up at the inside range of around 18 inches for the Summicron, here the flowers are starting to fade and brown a a bit from their peak a few days earlier.

A pink carpet of petals was starting to form under the tree.

And then another few days along, the flowers were giving way to green shoots and spring moves on toward summer.

The pink carpet is now almost wall to wall, showing that it was a good year for the Magnolia.

See you next spring!

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