It should not have been a day for shooting – what with all the storms yesterday and last night and the threat of more today. But my echinacea are on their last legs, more bad weather is looming for tomorrow, my son will be staying home on Friday, and the in-laws are coming over on the weekend. This possibly would be my last chance to shoot some jumping echinacea. It turned out that there was a perfectly sunny stretch from noon til about two. How lucky is that.

Echinacea and rudbeckia have an endearing trait: their petals droop as they mature. I thought I could take advantage of this to make them look flouncy when they hop. Here’s a test I made of the movement using photographs:

I had shot this last year and wasn’t satisfied with the result. I didn’t have any echinacea of my own and so when my husband went to Toronto to visit near the end of the summer he came back with the last of my mother’s. I remember shooting with these half dead flowers that didn’t match up well and it was insanely hot. The flowers were limp before I could get halfway through. I was limp too and could barely move or keep a single fact in my head, like: did I take this shot?

This year went better. Although I still really didn’t have much selection of flowers to choose from, it was OK. I arranged them in order of droopiness; cut the stems to get a little hop; shoved wire through their stems to straighten them out (this just felt wrong); and taped numbers to them to make the ordering idiot proof.

It’s insanely humid today too and half the flowers were limp before I finished – but still better than last year. And I finished just in time because it suddenly went dark I hear thunder in the distance. Pretty darn lucky.