Flowers are Blooming

Today we learned that later this week it may well get to 80 F! Oh. My. God. We are going to melt into little puddles of soylent green and flow into Puget Sound. How will we survive it simply not being cold any longer?

In celebration of this record breaking (no, really!) heat wave that is coming our way, here some flowers I found in the greenhouses of the local nursery.



I sure that many (most?) of you think it is strange to convert a flower photo to B&W. Isn't the essence of a flower its color? Not necessarily. this flower was a shade of red that completely saturated and made it very difficult to see any detail. By converting to monochrome, I can now bring out the texture of the petals without making the color looks unnatural. This is a much more interesting image this way.

Yellow flowers also tend to oversaturate this way. This one is just on the edge of being too much.

Here is one of the red flowers like the one above that I converted to B&W. Here I have cut back on the saturation of the large one in the middle and done my best to bring out the texture. There are still places where the color completely overwhelms the image.

White flowers are much easier to process. This one, with its subtle yellow center makes a nice image.