Creative photography with dandelions

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

As a gardener, you may turn your nose up at them, but if you do a bit of Googling, it turns out this wild plant has quite a lot going for it. As well as being very photogenic, dandelions have beneficial effects on your internal health.

You can actually just eat them. I tried it straight away. The flower is slightly sweet, while the leaves are a little bitter. I'm still alive, so trying it can't do any harm.

So, praise be to the dandelion! And it sounds a bit better in English: dandelion. Naturally, the highlight of its existence is the fluffy seed head, which I wouldn't eat.

Who didn't try, as a child, to blow all the seeds into the air in one go, hoping that... your wish would come true, your true love would return your feelings or that you would live to be 100? Yes, the dandelion has something magical about it!

They appear in large numbers around March and April. Seeing a meadow full of those cheerful yellow patches gives you such a summery feeling. Or seeing the fluffy seed heads lighting up so beautifully in backlight.

That always makes me want to photograph them. Early evening is an especially good time to jump on your bike and head out with your camera. You are guaranteed to come across a yellow field somewhere.

With dew, rain or sunshine, they are almost always worth photographing. Every year, it is a challenge for me to capture them differently.

How did I photograph them? The first two photos were taken with a standard zoom lens (24-105mm), handheld. But even at 105mm, it was quite difficult to get an uncluttered image.

I like photographing through greenery to isolate something. But I was missing a few millimetres. So I cropped the images in Lightroom to create that sense of calm in the photo.

For some variety, I continued experimenting with a macro lens. This time with extension tubes to get even closer to the subject, and this time using a tripod!

As it continued to rain, I picked a small bunch of dandelions from my own garden to photograph indoors. The flower that was still completely in bud caught my attention. I particularly liked the symmetry and the playful rosette!

To isolate my subject, I used a white sheet of paper as a background, giving the flower all the attention.

By using multiple exposure with the 'dark' setting, a sort of drawn effect was created. In Lightroom, I converted it to black and white, which makes it look almost like a pen drawing.

By pushing the stem through the paper, I was able to photograph it straight from above in the same way. Both images turned out fairly clean. I had never done this before, but I was very surprised by the result. From now on, a white card will always be in my camera bag!

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