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| Rosa 'Reine Victoria' Summer of 2001 |
In 1991 my Rosemary told me, “Alex, tonight we are going to the Vancouver Rose Society meeting at the Floral Hall at the VanDusen Botanical Garde". A few minutes into the meeting I told Rosemary, “I am seeing 100 terrible and boring slides of roses and I am sitting on an uncomfortable chair. Why have you brought me here?” Rosemary persisted and soon I was a happy rose fan and particularly keen on the interesting story of where roses came from and the names they were given.
But I vowed that I would never photograph individual roses and would only photograph the very nice rose beds of our Kerrisdale garden. Then one hot summer day of 2001 I found myself bored and I came up with the idea of placing a rose (Rosa ‘Reine Victoria) on my Epson scanner. Now in 2026 I may have at least 4000 scans of roses and other plants from my garden.
I firmly believe that I must show respect to what a rose is. I like to show it with it leaves. I abhor those macro photographs that isolate roses to the point that even their leaves are not shown. Rugosa roses have interesting leaves and many roses have early new shoots and leaves that are brilliantly red. I think that my scans of roses show that respect I have for their beauty. Rosemary did and would understand to this day. She would smile of this my first plant scan.
And now I must admit that I have photographed roses recently using a device called a LensBaby on my digital camera. The device was given to me by my genius photography friend Jeff Gin who is currently the manager of the Kerrisdale Cameras branch in North Vancouver. I first used the Lensbaby when I went to Venice and Florence with Rosemary. Here is the link below.
I found a few days ago that by using the Lensbaby and purposely overexposing on a sun drenched roses I achieved something that I really like.
