Rose – Beyond the Pale

This is another photograph that I took at Ryton Organic Gardens. I am hoping to create a calendar of flowers as a Christmas present for my mum next year and as Ryton has a new garden filled with roses it seemed ideal. Photographing a rose should be relatively easy, and is, if you cut it from the plant and photograph it in a studio. Standing in a rose garden, intoxicated by the scent (which seems to be missing from so many garden centre roses) there is a bit of decision overload, so many roses, which one to photograph. I settled on this one as I liked the shape and the pale colour. However, I did encounter some problems, firstly the wind. Although a rose is a pretty sturdy plant, when you start looking through a macro lens you realise how much everything, including yourself, is moving. The second problem was the sun, or should I say, the clouds. Although the sun was quite bright and potentially a bit harsh, I had several frustrating attempts whereby I was all set to press the shutter, the clouds moved and the light changed in an instant. A final problem, one encountered when photographing anything white is that it is easy to overexpose and lose some of the detail – I think I am there or thereabouts with this photo.
This is the one I settled on in the end, hand held, 100mm Canon macro lens, f/11, 1/125 sec, ISO 100. From a composition point of view, I like the shape and where it sits in the frame, it is slightly cropped which takes some of the leaf away on the left, but it removes a little of the distraction of the other roses in the background which, in an ideal world, wouldn’t be there.