I recently photographed some sweetness roses in my studio. It was a pretty frustrating shoot. I’d bought the best looking set of roses I could find and was hoping to create a photo of a group of rose buds. Let’s just say – it didn’t happen the way I planned

Sweetness Roses © 2014 Patty Hankins

What looked like perfectly lovely roses when I brought them home – didn’t look so good under the studio  lights and through my macro lens. All I could see was the damaged parts of the blossoms.

And then I tried arranging them in a vase with a grid designed to hold flowers in place. You should have seen me trying to keep the grid out of the photo. As you can see from the photos below – I couldn’t get the group of blossoms and not have the grid in the photo – so to share my vision I ended up spending much more time using photoshop than I usually do. And that was just to remove the grid – and clean up the worst of the damage to the blossoms.

Sweetness Roses © 2014 Patty Hankins

Sweetness Roses © 2014 Patty Hankins

Since I clearly wasn’t getting the photos I wanted of the group of roses, I tried photographing a few single blossoms – including doing some close up photos. Problem was – none of the flowers were really in good enough shape so I ended up doing some quick edits to remove the worst of the damage to the blossoms.

Sweetness Roses © 2014 Patty Hankins

Sweetness Roses © 2014 Patty Hankins

Sweetness Roses © 2014 Patty Hankins

Sweetness Roses © 2014 Patty Hankins

Of course the day wasn’t a total loss – at one point Kitty Ansel came by to remind me that sometimes you just need to stop and taste the roses . . .

Stop and Taste the Roses © 2014 William Lawrence

And next time I plan on spending time photographing roses in my studio – I’ll make sure to check them out more carefully at the store before I bring them home – and get multiple bunches to make sure I have enough flowers in great shape to create the photos I’m seeing in my brain 🙂