Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad ' 1 October 2026

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 28 September 2026 (earlier version of the one above)

A couple of days ago on September 28 I scanned a lovely bloom of my English Rose, Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’. It is one of my best roses and it also is great fall bloomer. After I scan my roses I put them into little vases and put them on my dining room credenza. Today when I returned from a day’s drive showing my San Francisco friend Jorge Urrechega I noticed the single bloom. I saw in it past due look a beauty that my friends from the Vancouver Rose Society would not accept. For them roses have to be at their perfection peak.

As an 84-year old man who is obsolete, redundant, retired and inconsequential, am I past my peak?

I believe that I am an artist and that I have to keep doing my stuff and only stop when that definitive end of my efforts will be my death.

While the old rose in the vase is not growing, it is slowly going in a similar direction as that of the man who cut it from its life-giving shrub. For me the transformation is a thing of beauty.

I feel the same of my Asahi Pentax S-3 I bought used in 1962 at Foto Rudiger in Mexico City. Even by then the black enamel had rubbed off to expose its brass body.

One of nomenclature changes in photography in this century that I abhor, is that photographers do not call their cameras, cameras. They might ask a new friend, “What kind of gear do you own?” These newish photographers see their pristine cameras as museum pieces which the coddle but do not seem to used them for what they were intended which is to take photographs. A term for these photographers is – gear heads.

There is a tidy purpose in a camera that looks like it has been used (an my Asahi Pentax indeed has been used and I keep using it) that favourably compares with my scan of the spent rose.