Seven Roses

It was our first wedding anniversary yesterday, being the paper anniversary I thought it prudent that my wife should get a print for her present. As I had no photo that would work well as a present for her I decided that I would take a totally new photo and work from there.

Originally I had thought of photographing one single rose, but after some thought I chose to use seven (one for each year we have known each other), this gave me more maneuverability on the composition and a chance to make it a little different. After picking up a bunch of ten roses from the local flower shop I cut them all down, took of the leaves and chose the seven best. Using some elastic bands that came with the flowers I managed to sort the flowers into a spiral, with one rose in the middle and the other roses spiraling around and away from the first rose. For a background I used an A3 sheet of black card with a hole cut in the center and then turned into a cone. The roses were then fed through that cone so they were surrounded by the card. I don't have any fancy lighting so I used diffused window light and set the flowers in a vase on a chair right next to the window.

I bracketed the shots changing the f/stop each time to ensure that I had at least one shot with the right sort of DOF. After developing the roll of film it turned out that my original thought (f/16) was the right one to chose. The next thing to do was to get this negative into the darkroom.

After making test prints and attempting to get everything right I settled on one print, unfortunately it wasn't until after I had dried the print that I noticed a small scratch along the middle of the center flower. My next attempt was better (no scratches) but I couldn't quite get my head around the top left-hand corner of the print where it needed quite a lot of burning in to get it a deep black. Finally after devising probably the most complex dodging and burning sequence that I have ever done I came to a print that I was truly happy with.

Below is a image with the dodging and burning written on it. Basically I ended up with a base exposure of 20 secs at grade 5, during which I dodged the bottom of the print for 7 secs. I then gave the print another 15 secs while dodging the flowers themselves. Followed by a final 30 secs on each corner. A scan of the final print can be found at the start of this entry.