How I Created a Floral Print From a Photograph

I don’t usually take photos of flowers in my wanderings and I typically don’t gravitate towards floral print patterns, but here’s a short story about how both of them just sorta happened.

I was walking the Arnold Arboretum, just off the Arborway in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, a couple of years ago, and tried my hand at photographing something, anything, other than people. It turns out that sometimes flowers, such as rhododendrons, can be more difficult to photograph than people. At least people can occasionally take direction, while plants will do their own damned thing, especially on a surprisingly breezy day.

Imagine trying to ask a flower to lower its chin and then stick its forehead out a little..?

So, yeah anyway, I don’t typically use Photoshop. It’s a discipline I picked up when I was an local news photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette but I wanted to test my editing prowess by isolating the rhododendron itself, giving it a slight psychedelic twist, and then punching it out onto a plain white background because I thought it would make a unique all-over pattern for a variety different products, like a really sexy bikini, a comfortable sports bra, or even an adorable crop top.

The heavy lifting was done with the free version of the Topaz Plugin Suite. It’s definitely not my usual image, and the entire process was a little outside my comfort zone, but I am happy with how it turned out.

What do you think?

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