White flowers opening on a plant that otherwise gives every impression of wanting to be left alone. Yuccas are not friendly at close range and I have the marks on my forearms to show for this one.
It is growing in a strip of city garden about a metre wide, between a wall and a pavement, in what cannot be more than a few centimetres of soil over rubble. Nothing about the position suggests it should be flowering and it is flowering anyway.
White on green
The exposure problem here is familiar: the petals are the brightest thing for streets around, and if you let them clip you lose the only detail that matters. Everything else can go dark. Leaves recover, white does not.
- Meter off the brightest petal and pull back a third of a stop.
- Shade the lens if the sun is anywhere near the frame edge.
- Shoot from slightly below so the flowers sit against sky or wall, not against more leaves.
- Accept a busy background or come back with something to hold behind it.
I did not come back with anything to hold behind it, so the background is busy. On reflection the tangle behind the flowers tells you where the plant is living, which the clean version would have hidden.
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