Rose Coloured Glasses

I have no hilarious tales concerning roses. I don't think I even have profound ones or mildly entertaining ones. I can tell you that for some reason, I find them difficult to photograph. Roses are perfection, and somehow that never quite seems to translate onto 'film' when I try and shoot them. I want to practice shooting roses, but somehow it would seem kinda selfish if I walked out of the grocery store with armloads of roses for myself. Now, before you get all high and mighty feminist on me, I have zero issue with a person buying flowers for themselves. When Safeway had BOGO tulips on one spring, you can bet your britches I had a dozen bouquets scattered about the house. I only had two vases at the time and had to stuff the tulips wherever they could fit, including the teapot, creamer, and sugar dish. No, we're penny pinching a little 'round here (it being the holidaze and all) and it's the season for giving, not for indulging on out-of-season flowers. Plus, my son is in the taste-test phase of his adventuring (which has included some fairly strange assaults on our Schnauzer), and I'm pretty sure any living thing that we bring into the house would end up in his mouth.



You'd think I'd have a funny story concerning roses since we do, after all, live in the wild rose province. People intentionally plant them here. In the Maritimes, they grow wild along the highway. We used to have them growing along the side of the house, but we didn't buy them. Nope. My folks went out with a shovel one afternoon and came back with a few bushes. Same went for the raspberry patch they had going in the back yard-- another highway transplant, so to speak. Come to think of it, I think a great many of the shrubs and whatnot in my parents' quite amazing garden had come from along the highway somewhere... the plants, and some of the more shapely rocks, which we got from a construction site that was on the way home from one of my summer jobs. My husband and I have talked about doing the same thing to the tangle of rose bushes planted outside the optometrist's office (midnight shovel raid!), but I reckon someone might notice, and I'm not up for tempting cowboy justice.



The shots you're seeing here today were taken from two locations. If you wander around to the back of the Parliament building in Victoria, you'll discover an English rose garden. If you get there early enough in the morning (after the sprinkler system has done its thing), you'll even get the requisite dew on the rose petals-- saves you from having to bring your own squirt bottle. The others were taken after the first snow here. There is a house down the street that has forsaken grass in favour of a jungle of roses. They aren't all that into pruning, so some of the bushes still have whole heads of roses still clinging for dear life, these dry, shriveled things among the red rose hips and the yellowish thorns-- thorns, by the way, of fairytale-esque proportions. I thought you might enjoy the juxtaposition of the lush, summery Victoria roses against the withered back-alley winter roses.

 

Puffy Excursion

I am a huge dandelion puff fan. If my father reads this, I'm sure he'd groan, since he spends a lot of time making sure they stay off the lawn. If he could, he'd set up some sort of invisible force-field to ward off blowing dandelion seeds. Not to mention, in this part of town, if you have one of those yellow heads peeping up from your yard, the neighbours might revolt. This is one manicured neighbourhood. Neighbour wrath aside, the real peril is the trek out to photograph the puffs. The mosquitoes around here travel in gangs. I am fairly certain they're responsible for our city's graffiti problem. They are definitely responsible for the puffiness of my derriere, which was attacked without mercy on the occasion of the puff photo shoot. I was wearing several layers of denim that particular evening, not as an homage to the denim-on-denim fashion atrocity of the 80s, no, but as skeeter armor. It failed. It did not deter the skeeters from getting me in my largest of targets as I bent and squatted to get my shots. Folks, there is nothing elegant about a vigorous bum scratch, not even if the other hand is gripping a beer. Alas. Considering all the floral shoots I've been doing this season thanks to the discovery of apple?cherry? blossoms in the 'hood, it would come as little surprise should my bottom swell to titanic proportions. Rest assured that in such an eventuality, I will photograph it for the posterity of my posterior.

I tried to get a little creative with the puff images. I love the sort of natural watery-ness to the images, the melding of the greens and shadows that sort of came about naturally. That sort of thing lends itself to a little artistic filtering with good old Adobe Photoshop. I find that this kind of artistic playfulness lends itself well to the puffs,especially not everybody might find framing and hanging dandelion fuzz on their wall quite as charming as I do.

I don't often fool with the images, filtering them and whatnot, but when I do, I like the results. In some cases, an artistic filter can salvage a shot I might have otherwise deleted. I once read the testimonial of a photog who won a prize in National Geographic's wildlife contest where she said she was about to delete the blurred photo of a running rabbit, but thought better of it, and used a filter to sort of play up the motion blur of the critter. Almost garbage, now a winner. I'm no Picasso (or Ansel Adams, for that matter), and some folks aren't into photography, but if you turn the image into a painting-esque print or something? Instant wall art. What do you think? To filter or not to filter?

Either way (shameless webstore plug ensuing), the puffs au naturale and avec a filter will soon be available for purchase.