Today I was out and about looking for something to photograph for my blog post of The Daily Artisan, and as is often the case, I wandered into flowers for sale. If you’ve been following my blog, you know how much I love flowers, both in the wild and in the studio – so it’s no surprise they were on my mind again for pictures.
First I saw beautiful, long-stemmed roses in all colors – yellows, pinks, pale pinks, whites, reds, and oranges – and they were elegant in the way you would expect a nicely wrapped bouquet of 12 to be. Something told me to keep looking around, though, and pretty soon I spotted why.
Over in the corner was a small, metal container holding a miniature rose plant, or, as the tag said, a “rosier,” which is French for “rosebush.” The flowers may have been tiny but they were big in impact from their multi-colored, patterned petals of red, pink and white.
Immediately I knew these were the flowers for me – all $6.99 of them – and home with me they came!
The miniature roses were a tad haphazard in their lack of consistent heights and sizes. And their stems weren’t anything that couldn’t be explained by the term “gangly.” Still, they were what I chose and what I wanted for my afternoon creative project. (Here’s a “before” photo of the rosebush with my pink ribbon draped over it, still looking decidedly casual, shall we say.)
I did a previous blog post where I took inexpensive flowers like these and photographed them with a macro lens and a simply styled scene to show how beautiful a flower is regardless of its cost. And this was exactly what I wanted to do today as I proudly carried out my day’s find.
When I got the rosier home (don’t the French always sound divinely cultured?!), I decided to use only the following props: red and pink surface and background; a taller galvanized steel vase that I could just slip the rosebush container into; and the deep-pink ribbon from some other things I’ve recently shot.
That would be it. Nothing more and nothing less for my not-so-fancy miniature rosebush (which, by the way, despite its size still causes a sting when you inadvertently grab a thorn on a stem).
Years ago when I got my first macro camera lens, I remember my inexperience and how I often would have the close-up shot I wanted but without a pleasing background of colorful bokeh, or blurs and swirls of color. I’m better now about remembering to frame shots so there’s color and texture for these backgrounds.
Sometimes it’s an actual background of something completely removed from the main object, and other times it’s just another part of the subject lined up in such a way that it serves as a backdrop for the prominent, forefront item.
The latter is what I mostly did today with the interesting miniature roses, and as I shot photographs and occasionally looked at them on my camera, I was pleased with the bold, dramatic colors and scenes that were taking shape!
It’s not that I transformed the small roses into anything more than what they were.
Rather, it just took a bit of notice and attention paid to them to see how beautiful these miniatures are, and how they can take on such a dramatic and elegant manner even when they’re the quietest, most subtle flower in the shop. (Spoiler alert – life lesson embedded in that last sentence!)
So, from my house to yours today, enjoy these photographs of the “petit rosier avec des fleurs miniatures” – the small rosebush with miniature flowers! (My five years of French classes in elementary school and college did NOT go to waste …!)
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