Eliane Pellegrini captures fleeting moments in Nature’s Colourful Whisper.
For Edmonton photographer Eliane Pellegrini, the difference between a photograph and nothing can come down to a few milliseconds.
The wind has to stop. The sunlight has to fall at the right angle. An insect has to stay still long enough for her to press the shutter.
“If you miss, you miss,” she said.
Pellegrini’s exhibition, Nature’s Colourful Whisper, at St. Alberta Visual Arts Studio Association (VASA) on display now until Saturday, Oct. 3, is filled with vivid flowers, plants, and tiny creatures she finds in the fleeting space between motion and stillness.
The photographs are the product of a career that has taken some unexpected turns.
“I had a whole career path laid out for me,” Pellegrini writes in her artist statement. “I studied law for five years and worked in the field for a couple of years and — with all due respect — the bureaucracy, the paperwork, and the divorces just started to feel like they weren’t what I wanted for my life anymore.”
So she switched gears.
Pellegrini moved into wedding photography, working alongside her husband, Marcos. Together, they have photographed more than 700 weddings, travelling to 13 countries and earning dozens of awards.
“That’s where I truly found myself, surrounded by laughter, happy tears, and people living one of the best days of their lives,” she writes.
Macro photography was already part of that work. Pellegrini used it to capture the details that can disappear in the bigger picture: a wedding ring, the texture of a dress, the small pieces that make up a wedding day.
That interest eventually led her to earn a degree in Digital Multimedia. She also co-created the International Family and Maternity Award, which she describes as a brand-new concept when it began. The award is celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2026.
Years later, the Pellegrinis moved to Alberta, beginning another chapter in a new country and a new city.
Now, her camera is often pointed at something much smaller.
Her nature project grew from what she calls “a deep and intimate connection to the beauty hiding in plain sight,” where “a secret world lives right under our noses.”
That world includes insects, flowers, and details that can be easy to overlook without a macro lens and without patience.
“The velvety bokeh, the immense amount of patience to wait until everything falls into place: the wind has to die down, finding an angle where the sunlight isn’t too harsh on the lens, hoping the bugs don’t move too fast or fly away before you hit the shutter,” she wrote.
A single plant might produce 10 or 12 photographs, depending on the conditions. Even then, only the strongest images make it into her portfolio.
“The closer, the harder,” Pellegrini says of macro photography.
The challenge is part of what connects her current work to the weddings that came before it. In both, she is looking for something that cannot be staged: a fleeting expression, a tiny detail, a moment when everything happens to line up.
“It’s very fun and very difficult,” said her husband, Marcos. “You cannot fabricate this.”
For Pellegrini, photography has become less about simply taking a picture and more about learning to notice what is already there.
“Maybe this is the biggest lesson photography can teach us, and certainly what it has been teaching me. From the deep bond of family ties to a single leaf that graciously decided to stay still, learning how to truly see, recognizing how much a single moment matters, and being fully present inside it is a priceless gift.”