Daisy

The scientific name being Leucanthemopsis alpina, very similar to the Bellis perennis, and commonly know as Daisy, this flower, for some reason, immediately recalls childhood, joy, freedom, to me.

It's probably because it's so easy to be found on the alps, where I've spent a lot of time when I was a child, "trekking" with my parents on the mountains around our comfortable flat in Sauze di Cesana, a small (very small!) village not far from Torino.

I have many memories of that place, and that period. When we finally left the flat, I was 9. It's 19 years ago now... That sounds so much! Still, I can remember it very well: the garden surrounding the house, the child I was playing with, and Champion, a german shepherd dog who turned out to be one of my best friends ever.

Believe me, it's not that I've never been on the mountains again since. We bought our own flat then (well... my parents did) in Briançon, a nice city on the other side of the Alps, in France... but, to put it simply, it has never been the same again.

Anyway, it happens, sometimes, that some little details, some colours, some perfumes, some tastes, they recall us something from the past, of a lost time which will never really come back, but which will not get lost anyway.

Daisy, to me, is one of those little details, and that's why is somehow quite recurrent in my photos, whenever I can find a nice one.
This was the case for the one I'm showing you here. I was on a photo-trekking around Chamrousse, on a warm, sunny middle august day. I just had lunch (I had prepared some tasteful rice salad to bring along with me) on the shore of a magnificent mountain lake, and it was time to go back down. I was walking on the path, when I sow this wonderful daisy, standing there just by the side. On the background, the mountains were standing proud against the sky, so I had this vision.

In my photos, I often put a subject on a foreground, using the background as, well, a background. This was the case: my subject was the Daisy, but I wanted to transmit my personal meaning of daisy: a symbol of peace, a sign of the mountains, a wish of freedom.
So, I put on my 50mm f/1.4, closed down a bit (f/5.6) to ensure a depth of field allowing to have the flower pretty sharp, and to still recognise the background, leaving it out of focus anyway.
This way, the flower becomes my subject, and the mountains behind become my feeling, what that flower means to me. The result works well.
This is how a selective focus can be used to "write down" emotions, to describe our feelings.
Photography is poetry, after all!