Starting from a Blank Canvas – Flower and Still Life Photography – Polina Plotnikova

13th October 2026

Our guest speaker on Tuesday was Polina Plotnikova.

Polina is well known for her fabulous and unique flower photography and her wonderful Still Life work.

Flower Photography

The first half of the evening featured Polina’s work with flowers.

She explained that her presentation would centre around the inspiration for her work and her approach.

Polina studied Art at university and told us that some of her main inspiration came from the artist Jan Van Huysum for his detailed study of flower form, Van Gogh and Monet for their impressionist style, Georgia Okeefe for her unique close-up images of flowers and the photographer Robert Mapple Thorpe for his bold directional lighting and black and white images of single flowers. These were among some of her influences.

She went on to discuss her technique and show her studio set up, equipment explaining why she used this way of photography and her favoured types of lenses.

She discussed how her next project was to capture flowers in their later stages of life displaying them with graceful beauty.

Polina is very generous with her knowledge and techniques and shares with the audience how she captured her dancing flowers. Most of her work is taken in camera. She keeps post processing to a minimum.

Still-life Photography

After the break Polina introduced her ‘Still Life’ work and as with her flower presentation her amazing images accompanied her talk.

She explained that an image could take anything for two hours to set up and photograph to two years. Laughing that she was a perfectionist she said that an image had to be right and that she liked to photograph it and study it changing things in the picture until she felt comfortable with it. The light, textures colours, and objects had to be right as well as composition. Her study of art she said helped in this area. Again, Polina shared people who inspired her work such as Francisco de Zurbaran and Rene Magritte.

The two hours slipped away very quickly and Polina spoke with such passion for her work which greatly inspired her audience. She came to us five years ago and we are hoping she will return at a later date to share with us another one of her presentations.

Blog written by Carol Haines