Introduction

One of the fun things about Glass.photo is that they set members a challenge each month in the form of a featured category.

On Glass categories are like tags, even using the traditional tag icon, but unlike most tagging systems, Glass really makes you think about your categories by limiting both the categories that exist, and the number of them any single photo can be assigned to. Each category has a matching blog post explaining what it’s about, and while the list of categories has slowly grown, it’s not overwhelming. When you upload a photo you can assign it to a maximum of just three categories. This deliberate curation nudges users to categorise thoughtfully, and keeps the signal-to noise ratio high on the entire platform. This makes it fun to scroll through the categories you’re interested in.

So, each month the staff choose a category to feature. Sometimes they use this as an opportunity to add a new category, sometimes they chose to spotlight an existing category. The choices are often timely. At the start of each month the staff kick things off with a blog post outlining their hope’s for the chosen category, and for that month, the category turns golden and is pinned to the start of the list in the photo upload interface. Early the next mont another staff post will appear showcasing the staff picks from the previous month’s category.

The April 2026 feature category is ’Forest’. Exactly as the staff intended, I was inspired to go shoot for the category. Over the Easter break I decided to shoot a series to capture the beautiful wild flowers that always burst into bloom along the woodland trails in Carton House estate near Maynooth.

My goal was well defined — capture a series showcasing the wild flowers in their forest setting. I didn’t want generic flower macros, but photos of woodland flowers!

The Plan

I’ve been dealing with some health stuff so I haven’t been cycling and don’t have my usual energy levels, but on Easter Monday I felt up to the gentle walk to Carton, and a slow stroll through the prettiest part of the woodland trail. I decided to make an afternoon of it, and plan a slow stroll with plenty of photo stops.

I made two up-front decisions to try steer the feel of the shots I’d come home with, and maximise my chances of achieving my goal of capturing wild forest flowers in their environment rather than generic flower macros:

1. Shoot low, close, and wide
2. Shoot vertical

I always like to shoot from my subject’s POV, be it kids, pets, wildlife, or flowers, so I tend to shoot wild flowers low anyway. By also getting close while shooting wide I could still get detail in the flower while also capturing a feel for the setting. Ideally, I wanted the background to be in soft enough focus not to distract, but be clear enough to give the desired sense of place.

Why choose to shoot vertical? Because woods are tall places! I always feel small in a forest, so imagine the feeling if you’re just a few inches tall growing in the shadow of those big trees. My usual love of square and landscape crops won’t capture any hint of a sense of smallness, so it made sense to go the other way, and shoot vertical. I was didn’t want to be too rigid about this, because I strongly believe every shot should use the aspect ratio that works best for the subject, but I definitely wanted as many shots as possible to be as vertical as possible.

The Optics of Wide & Close

Shooting wide and close works well in this situation because wide angle lenses do the opposite of telephoto lenses.

When you shoot telephoto the background gets stretched — a tiny bit of the real world gets spread out to become the background for the entire image. Wide angle lenses do the opposite, they shrink the background, pulling in more of the world than you’d get a 1x, and squeezing it into the background of the image.

Shooting wide shrinks things more and more the further they are from the lens, hence the need to get really close to retain foreground detail.

So, by shooting close, low, and wide, I get the actual flower I want, and from a captivating POV, but I also get a sense of the flower being in a forest!

The Result

I may not be an impartial judge, but what matters most to me is being able to take pride in the photos I share with the world, and by that metric, I’m really happy with the results!

View the series on Glass.

My process is always to shoot freely and cull mercilessly, so those are the keepers from about 100 shutter fires.

Now, how do those keepers align with my plans?

Low, close, and wide?

They were all shot with the widest lens the iPhone offers, the 0.5x, so definitely all wide!

With one exception, all were shot using my usual trick of holding the phone up-side-down so the lenses can go almost all the way to the ground. I didn’t always go that low, but all but one were shot within an inch or two of the ground.

The exception is the shot of the bluebells — these flowers are different to the others because they hang down from foot tall flowering spikes, so I shot those from about a foot off the ground. Still low I guess, but definitely not ground level!

As for close — that varied a little too. Some like the celandines and the saxifrages had the lens less than an inch from the blooms, the primroses in particular were shot from further back to allow their leaves to feature as prominently as the blooms.

As for the vertical aspect ratio, as planned, I didn’t insist on any particular aspect ratio, but let the subject decide. I even shot a few in landscape orientation, but they just didn’t work nearly as well as their vertical alternatives, so none of those made the final cut.

In the end the least-vertical keepers were relatively square at just 4:5, like the wild violets, and the bluebells were the most vertical at 9:16!

Final Thoughts

All-in-all this little mini project was an enjoyable success. Taking the time to set clear aims really helped keep me focused while I was in the field (or the woods).

Photography is different to most creative arts because it’s inherently subtractive rather than additive. You don’t start with a blank canvas and add things, you start with all of reality and remove everything but those chosen little piece! When wondering in a rich environment like a forest it’s easy to be overwhelmed, but by pre-visualising my desired results, I found it a lot easier to find the relevant sub-sets of reality to capture!

I set out to tell a specific story, and based on the comments I got on Glass and social media in general, people saw what I was trying to show.

I hope I’ve illustrated the value of a little planning, and I hope you find at least some of my advice relevant for your future projects!