This is my advice, to all the bees on earth:
Don't waste your energy doing your job at night!
First because it's much harder to fly in the dark,
but overall, you'll find lots of flowers closed!

However,
for the photographers who hardly close eyes,
it can really be worth it staying up all night
and bringing your torchlight out..!

That's what I figured out, on my first attempt to photography a very common topic: flowers.

And that's the story I'm about to tell you :)








Flowers are beautiful, and quite photogenic, plus they don't move when wind is nice: Nice!
Yes. The thing is, as a matter of photography, You, and I might not be the first ones to a choose a flower as model!

I tried, submitting a picture of flower, and I thought coming with a special one,
as mine had a cute baby snail exploring its wet petal...









Still, it seemed not beeing new enough, or my baby snail was too small to be noticed... : Rejected!
I was happy though, to discover a reason of rejection I never encountered before and a good advice:

"We have too many similar images already. Please perform a search on the subject before uploading,
to see what is already online and where to fill niches."









Fill niches! That's a brilliant idea!

I am rather new in submitting my pictures on Dreamstime (first uploads in Jan 2011), and am still in the process
of making tries on every topics (which may not help my sales, but gives me fun! :)

And as I don't have all the time, experience and equipment to compete on standards,
focusing on niches is certainly very good choice!

I didn't want to give up totally on flowers and started to think about what kind of niches could flowers fill,
what lead me to the question: in which situation aren't we used to see flowers?










I then remembered that night we went with my girlfriend to close the big gate outside, somewhere in Normandy,
and surprised a cute bunch of daisyflowers in the middle of sleep!

I already took a snapshot at that time, with the torchlight as only light, and it remained a magical instant!
I found the photo back, but quality wasn't good enough, so I decided to go back, alone in the dark, with camera and torchlight!


Laying on the fresh and already wet ground, I tried myself on some light painting with the torchlight,
and even discovered another magic phenomenom: the dewdrops that form just on top of grass like shiny pearl!










Picture was not accepted at my first try, what gave me another lesson:
if a picture doesn't render totally our intention, it's not always lost,
we can still improve the mood of a picture afterwards
with photoshop (or the gimp, actually :)

That's how I decided to add some stars and a moon, so that we really realize this picture was taken at night,
and give it a surreal mood, like it happens in dreams..!











And... here is my result!

I like it, it makes me very peaceful looking at it.

Someone else already liked it (1 download on first day!), and I want to thank him/her to pick my pic
and give me motivation to write this first blog and continue filling niches! =)

I hope you like it too, and it gives you sweet dreams!









After searching Dreamstime,
I think this picture really was a "niche idea",
because if we find some pictures of flowers at night,
they are all incredibly awake!

Flowers are living beeing and they actually do lots of things!
But they are so slow most of the time, that we tend to forget about it...
Photography is a fantastic tool allowing us to stop the time,
and thus helping us catching the pace of virtually anything, including slow things like flowers..!

So let's slow down a bit, open eyes, and the marvel of nature may overcome our dreams!









Happy dreams, and thank you for reading! :)

- Jean

For more info about flowers sleep:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyctinasty

And a cool idea of making a flower clock, the scientist Carolus Linnaeus got in the early 19th century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaeus%27_flower_clock