Flower Show

Anne and I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show, where there was no shortage of flowers or photo opportunities. This year's theme was Ireland, so many displays hinted at the beauty of its countryside. The outdoor displays were a mix; only a few managed to convey a true sense of the natural outdoors without looking overly staged. The contest entries were more appealing; there were some real works of art in constrained spaces.

Photography was pretty tricky; the convention center lighting was dim with powerful spots emphasizing parts of the displays. Tripods were banned due to the foot traffic, and I don't use one anyway, but you'd need one to get good photos. It was also one of the few occasions when I would've liked DSLR for the better low light performance and external flash control.

Instead, I made do taking multiple photos with various flash settings and got a decent number properly exposed. A bit of tweaking in Picasa helped out a few more, though what I really wanted was an inverse gradient filter to counter the flash washing out the foreground. (Picasa only offers one geared towards dimming the sky, and my manual experiments in GIMP were unsatisfactory.) I'm also finding a square aspect ratio to be fun for some cropping, and threw one off-color shot into black and white.

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