An Artist Who Doesn’t Sit Still: Hilda Champion

by Art David

So, what does Hilda Champion do when she isn’t traveling around the world taking International award-winning images of landscapes and architectural photos of places like Xiapu, China, Bosque del Apache, Spain, Louisiana, and Berlin? In her spare time, while in Naples, Florida she takes photos of flowers; however, they are not the images of flowers that one ordinarily sees.  If you visited her website  https://HildaChampion.com, you would see that her visions of landscapes, elements, and people are not merely limited to just ‘regular’ images. Instead, she is a ‘painter’ who uses her camera and her artistic sensibilities to create pictures that capture exciting movement of energy and color. I was lucky enough to catch Hilda one day when she wasn’t on the road filling her extensive portfolio with extraordinary images of buildings, landscapes, and elements throughout the world.  Instead, she agreed to demonstrate to me and my wife, Sharon, a technique that she had been experimenting with for photographing beautiful, if not surreal, images of flowers that she had submerged in a water tank.

Her technique involves a studio set-up that includes a rolling table, a medium-sized glass fish tank, an assortment of cut flowers (some frozen before being submerged in the tank), an assortment of small round rocks, a seamless background, a ruler, studio lights, an eye dropper, her camera, and a tripod, and, of course, enough water to fill the tank.

The first step is marking exactly where the wheels of her table will be placed and measuring exactly the focus for the middle of the tank. She uses the ruler, placed on an angle to manually set the focus on her camera.

Once she fills the tank and sets the flowers into position by propping them up with a few of the landscape rocks that she has collected from her garden, she rolls the set-up into her studio.  Hint:  If you plan on doing this, you can use a foam ‘noodle’ as a quick hose to very easily fill up the tank.

After setting her lights, she takes some test shots to see how the position of the lighting affects that particular flower; it is important to note that changes to the lighting have a significant effect on the final images.  So, don’t be afraid to move the lights around to find the best angle for your images.

Hilda has experimented with colored inks, milk, and food coloring to create a liquid medium in which to submerge her flowers, but found that it is easier to photograph the flowers when set in clear water and then drop a variety of colored liquids into the tank and photograph the ‘scene’ as the droplets roil into the water and create interesting shapes and ‘clouds.’  Eventually, the water gets cloudy and too opaque to shoot any more images, but the fun is in the process.  Hilda also experimented with different ‘solvents’ like hair spray (too messy), oils mixed with water, inks, and powders to create different milky or ethereal effects.

Now the ‘fun’ begins.  Once she has the setup and lighting the way she wants it, she begins to drop the coloring into the tank and take photos as the droplets merge into the water and create a surreal scene within the tank.