“When I started to notice the personality of a flower, it was with the poppy,” says Spanish photographer Thais Varela, whose fondness for blooms has enhanced her intuitive eye for color. The strange and alien poppy fascinated her, drawing her to capture them like a close-up object. “It blew my mind: The textures, the colors, and what I could convey in the petals and forms.”
A self-taught photographer, Thais has focused on play and experience to develop her practice. One spring, she bought different flowers each week, observing them closely, arranging and rearranging them, moving her camera around the room, and taking photographs — for three or four hours at a time. “Get closer, get further away, modify the light,” she recalls of her process. “I really enjoyed myself.”
That same observation, play, and pleasure were key to her first studio light project, Flora and Nostalgia. “I wanted to understand artificial lighting, which I had never worked with.” For a year, Thais photographed flowers with two studio lights and a few solid-color backgrounds in her small space. The result of her time and study is a strong intuition, a beautiful project, and a path toward more editorial and portraiture work.
She’s shared two of her Lightroom presets for you to try out, one for enhancing details in artificial light, and one for bringing out color in all situations.
Lilium, for artificial light.
“Lilium is a preset that works very well when there are two opposing temperatures in your lighting scheme,” Thais says. "It adds saturation, contrast, and strength to your final image. By moving the temperature from warm to cool, you get a completely different result."
To edit this image, Thais took advantage of the lily's white petals. “I put one light to illuminate the background, and then another to illuminate the lily and create contrast. In the end it has more of the effect of a painting.”
You don't have to be in a studio, though; Lilium will create a stylized effect no matter the light. Try it out.
In the studio, Thais found she could manipulate the light to make the personality of each flower really pop. Plus, she’s found that artificial lighting has led to fewer, easier edits later on: “When working with natural light, I spend more hours editing.”
Thais begins each edit by applying one of her own presets. Then she proceeds, little by little, to tweak each and every slider in the Edit module: Temperature, Tint, Shadows, all of it. “I really enjoy the relationships of color, and so I also really like Color Grading.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Thais Varela is a commercial and creative photographer based in Spain. Her work stands out for the use of color and light to transmit sensations and capture stories. She creates captivating imagery across the genres of still life, portraiture, lifestyle, and travel photography. Follow her on Instagram.
