December 2021 - Rose in the sky

We were in a lockdown for part of December and onwards last year, so I was back to my indoor photography. I don’t find it easy to see what to take pictures of: my imagination doesn’t (yet) run to thinking of all the things in my home that could be photogenic. It really is a limitation of mine, and not in any way a statement of how little there is to photograph. I regularly get emails that give ideas on home photography … maybe I need to pay more attention to them.

And my flower photographs – if you follow these articles or my blog, you will have seen a number of them – are nice, but I have felt recently that I needed to do a bit more to them to make them stand out. So, this rose – a lovely red rose in a bouquet that I had given to my wife (or was it the other way round? Oops!) – was quite attractive on its own against a plain background, just as I had photographed it. But, as one of our club judges said (about not-winning photographs) “they are good, but not exciting”. And this one was in the ‘good’ category.

So, I deleted the background in Photoshop and then added in some sky from another photo taken early one morning. I chose a fairly mild set of colours – vivid would have drowned out the rose, and dark would have looked silly. And this is the result. In my view, the rose stands out against a background that doesn’t take away from it but does have its own interest.

Some people say that you shouldn’t ‘Photoshop’ pictures like this – leave them as they originally were so that the photo is faithful to the reality of what was in front of the camera. I disagree very strongly: I wonder how many classical painters included everything in the scenes that they painted – was Constable’s ‘The Haywain’ perfectly true to what he saw, or did he add or subtract a cow in the fields? The point is that photographs can be meant to be a true record, but they can also be a piece of art, which does not demand complete accuracy to the scene. (And there’s a lot more on the subject of art and photography that we may return to in the future).