High Summer, When Flowers Turn to Pure Color
Up close they are poppies and daisies; from a step back they are only pigment, laid down by the field.
In July the flowers give up on subtlety. A poppy field reads as one long stroke of red before you can pick out a single bloom; a bank of lavender sets a whole slope humming in violet; a stand of daisies turns a meadow the flat white of paper. The eye stops sorting stems and starts reading color by the acre.
Photographing them is a question of distance. Step close and you get structure — the black heart of a poppy, the ragged edge of one white petal. Step back and the same flowers dissolve into a wash, the field flattening into bands the way a long lens likes to stack them. Neither view is wrong; they are two pictures growing in the same soil.
On a screen the far view usually wins. A block of poppy red or lavender blue fills the display without asking to be studied, holding its saturation whether you look or not. It is a wallpaper made mostly of one color, which is exactly the sort that survives being glanced at forty times a day.
