This is one of my favorite images that I’ve made. Not because I think it’s a spectacular image or anything, but because of what went into it.
I took this photo way back in September of 2012. It’s special to me for two reasons:
One, is that it was one of the first images I really worked with when I got Lightroom. It was a game-changer for me! I realized that even if i didn’t get the image just right in-camera I could do a lot to make it beautiful in Lightroom. To prove it, here’s the original:
I was thrilled that I could transform an image so drastically to make something I really liked.
The other reason this one is special to me is because of the roses. We had two rose bushes at our place at the time; one red and one white. They were the first time I had ever had roses. They smelled amazing. The previous year we had picked them as they bloomed so the following year (the year I took this picture) they bloomed like crazy. I spent the entire summer harvesting roses and made my own rosewater (which I still have!) and a jar of infused rose oil from a gagillion dried blossoms (which I called “rosebush oil” because it contained nearly a entire bush’s worth of roses).
These two roses were the very last full blooms of each bush and I treasured them sitting in their little cobalt bottle on the sunny, West-facing window of my office. It thrilled me that I was able to capture them in an image that I liked so much.