After a few halcyon, summer-like days the spring blossoms are in full splendor. When I managed to get out with my camera it was mostly grey and overcast and I came away feeling like I had not been able to work the true beauty into my camera. I often find a way to work with poor light but sometimes nothing feels quite right.
There is a spectacular tree in blossom at the arboretum at the moment and you can see its twisted form in a couple of the above photographs. I photographed it from the ‘inside’ because the entwined branches drape around you in such a way that you can’t really imagine a more perfect place.
My images don’t do it justice in any way. Often, I find it necessary to spend a long time with a subject experimenting with different ways of photographing to capture a real sense of the subject or my experience of it. Sometimes going back several times in different light and conditions. But the blossoms are so fleeting it makes it difficult to do this. It is one of the challenges I love about making images, though – finding, and working with, the ephemeral.
There are times where I merge images together, layering and adding ‘ghosts’. I do this with in-camera double exposures, and sometimes afterwards in processing (in this case images 1,3,4). It is not that I want to tell an untruth with these images; more so the opposite. It is an attempt to express the sense of an experience that I have haven’t managed to capture. Adding layers to an image the way we add layers to our memories.
© Karen McRae, 2013
These are the last of the little seedheads from my garden that I have been documenting through the seasons. Somehow a few of them survived the weight of winter relatively intact. I had left them in the garden so I could photograph them on this side of winter. 
These little remnants of flowers have been through many transitions over the last few months. They have been frosted, covered in freezing rain, and buried under snow.
draw and shoot 