Feature Design Article
Making Your Final Photography Selections as You Prepare To Submit Your Work for Publication

Learn how to make your photo selections quickly and effectively from Eureka editor, Ken Gregory.

All images for this article taken from the new 2007 Eureka DVD featuring the photography, in digital formats, from five Eureka Guides!

You've nurtured and photographed your own flower beds. You've visited and photographed your daylily friends' gardens in bloom. You've even traveled to regional and possibly national tour gardens and taken hundreds of photographs. What do you do now and how do your make the final decisions? Learn how to make your photo selections quickly and effectively from Eureka editor, Ken Gregory.

Study these photographs and the editor's critiques to better understand which images you should submit to be in the next Eureka Daylily Reference Guide.

Image #1, Hemerocallis 'Key West', from the 2005 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Stephanie Annee of Canton, GA, beautifully exemplifies the Eureka daylily portrait. When we started Eureka Daylily Reference Guides back in 1991, the daylily image seen in catalogs and other publications was the flat-faced, single-bloom, full-frame photograph.

As soon as we could afford a few pages of color and then added more pages each year until we got to 50% of the Guide in full color, we intentionally featured the double-bloom image with our own photography of two daylilies in a single picture. Soon we also featured this kind of image from the hundreds of contributing photographers whom we encouraged and published. We still prefer it for the majority of our images.

Why should you choose this option to submit if you have the same cultivar photographed as single and double image portraits? As publishing editor, I impose my direction on the book and I am convinced that the Eureka reader will learn much more about a cultivar he may never have seen from a photo showing the daylily's characteristic bloom from multiple angles. Image #2, H. 'Forever Redeemed', from the 2006 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and photographed by Susan Okrasinski of Kingsport, TN, demonstrates this beautifully. The form of the petals and other bloom anatomy appear more clearly as we see the same bloom from two different angles.

Also from the 2006 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide, Image #3, H. 'North Wind Dancer', by Tee Money of Headland, AL, accomplishes all of these compositional successes with an often difficult-to-photograph, two-bloom, spider-style cultivar. Not only is the background clutter dominated by the sharply focussed foreground bloom but the upper bloom is also less sharp than the main bloom. The separates the two bloom for the Eureka reader so you don't have a Medusa-like tangle of petals and sepals when the camera flattens the multiple blooms. The difference in focus for the two blooms makes the image communicate the flower's nature better than an equally focussed image.

Compare this photograph to Image #4, H. 'Marked By Lydia', photographed by Lynn Thor of Oregon, Il and published in the 2005 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide. While I readily chose this photograph for publication and loved this depiction of the cultivar, the composition could be further enhanced with some more separation of the two blooms allowing the foremost one to own the composition.

Another technique you can employ to make your final photographic decisions with multiple shots of the same plant is to choose the image where overlapping components of the cultivar separates the two blooms and accomplishes what focus has not. Image #5, H. 'Exquisitely Subversive' from the 2006 Eureka Daylily Reference and by Mettie Fisher of Princeton, NJ, clearly separates the two blooms from being a confusing mass of petals with the overlapping petal featuring it's bold gold edge. This pops the foreground bloom forward giving the Eureka reader a sharply defined bloom at the same time as the two bloom still group together for compositional simplicity.

Image #6, H. 'Faces Of A Clown', by Jean Jefferies of Nashville, TN and published in the 2004 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide does it all beautifully. The slight overlapping plus the major depth of field difference between the two blooms makes this image both descriptively intense at the same time as it is compositionally delightful. This is what I've always wanted Eureka to feature.

Likewise, Image #7, H. 'Granny Cote', photographed by Pearline Malone of Afton, TN and published in the 2007 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide, does everything so well. The two extremely different angles of view for the blooms provide the Eureka reader with a real garden-sense of what the plant flower will look like. While reds are often very difficult for many digital cameras to correctly display with subtle difference in the reds becoming ugly magenta, the warm reds here show a wide range of expression.

Additionally, red and green are complementary colors. When you compare the backgrounds of these two photographs, #6 uses a high contrast between the light and aggressive yellow foreground popping out on the dark and receding background while #7 places the red flower against (what could have been) a very busy background of foliage.

However when you juxtapose two complementary colors like this red on green, the two colors intensify one another and separate the foreground from the background. Also, red advances the flower toward the viewer while green moves the background further back in a psychological sense. You can achieve the same effect with other complementary contrasts such as yellow on purple and orange on blue.

Sometimes it's impossible to resist the photographic call of a clump of blooms for a single cultivar. Looking at Image #8, H. 'Blue Oasis', from the 2004 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Rebecca Board of Chapel Hill, NC, we see an example of exactly how to avoid the clutter of a clump at the same time as we create a stunning daylily portrait. The solutions are the same as above but even more important when you have several blooms competing for the viewer's attention. Overlapping, depth of field and dominance all work together to pop the central bloom out and simplify the photo composition.

Image #9, H. 'Irving Shulman', from the 2006 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Sharron Canelos of New Truxton, MO, works so beautifully for the same reasons but also gives us a little more. With my art and photography students, I often encouraged them to break out of a symmetrical balance mind-set and explore other options for achieving balance in their compositions. The previous image is mostly a symmetrically balanced image with a line down through the middle whereby left balances right.

However, here we have an asymmetrically balanced image with the eye being pulled from an initial and irresistible starting point at the lower left and then up and to the top right. Why is it balanced? Because the lower bloom dominates the image and gives us a place to start and then come back to as we view the photo composition at the same time as the eye is directed up and over by the line of blooms.

This kind of movement gets the viewer more involved in the image than symmetrical composition. The smaller, background bloom still feels balanced with the larger foreground bloom because of its dynamic movement outward from the core of the image. The linear movement from lower left to upper right gives the eye a path of exploration much as a garden path directs us through a garden. And the large bloom at the bottom snaps us back to the major element of the design much as a water feature would in a large garden.

Now, compare these multiple-bloom photos to Image # 10, H. 'Connie Can't Have It', from the 2007 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Shirley Toney of Nineveh, IN. This photo demonstrates radial balance. Notice that all the parts of the image seem to radiate out from a central point in a wheel-like composition.

This method makes an image that is riveting to the viewer and it directs the viewer's eye around and around the photo but always brings the eye back to the middle. The composition so perfectly captured the beauty of this cultivar that I immediately decided that I had to have this plant and soon bought it myself.

While not a radial balance image, a similar approach in Image #11, H. 'Nosferatu' from the 2007 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Marietta Crabtree of Shelby Township, MI, directs the Eureka reader to start viewing the composition with the foreground, large bloom and then move up and through the grouped blooms and wonder on into the lush garden beyond the area of sharp focus. After we drift off into the softly focussed background, we're brought back into the photographers main intent and to the dominant bloom near the bottom.

I don't use too many single-bloom shots each year in Eureka but I do need some. Looking at Image #12, H. 'Spacecoast Blastoff' from the 2004 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Donna Stronk of New Lenox, IL, we see an single-bloom composition that works. The oblique angle give us much more interest than a flat-faced image. The left-reaching bloom anatomy finds perfect balance with the right-reaching stems of the background foliage. The sharp foreground maintains visual control over the soft, but compositionally important, background.

Image #13, H. 'Sparticus Adorned' from the 2005 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Scotty Innes of Signal Mountain, TN, broke through my single flower image barrier by using a similar colored companion plant softly focused in the background. While the forms are different enough to make the main image leap off the page, the harmonious color repetition ties all of the elements in the photo together.

Image #14, H. 'Trahlyta' from the 2004 Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and by Rita Adkins of Frenchburg, KY, works so beautifully for the same reasons but here the similar color is the blazing throat. Companion plants add so much to a composition and garden but when they also pick up and repeat one of the colors from the daylily they become one with the star attraction.

Now it is your chance to take the hundreds of images that you have taken this year as you walked through the gardens and make your final selections.

You have one month to prepare your entry, meet the September 1 deadline and possibly see your name in the next Eureka as a feature photographer!

Also, due to family issues this year I was unable to attend the 2007 AHS National Convention. I would be very interested in featuring the tour gardens with AHS members enjoying the bloom and company as well as the blooms from those gardens. Be sure and include the tour garden hosts as part of your information.

Here are three tour-garden photos that I took and used in Eureka to help guide you in your selections. I believe that this is the most difficult photo assignment of all. First, I want to clearly see some people's faces as well as bloom. This can be quite a challenge as you contend with large brimmed hats, cameras and the quickly turned backside.

Second, select those images where we can also see some of the gardens layout, uniqueness and architectural features.

And third, select photos that show the people doing something. We all know how active gardens can be so show us some of that activity - - taking photos, notes, talking, pointing.