A Visit to the Rose Test Garden

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After a year and a half in Portland, I finally made my way to the International Rose Test Garden a few days ago. It was there I tested my new Mamiya 645 Pro, the one I bought to replace the failing M645 that causes all those overlaps and light leaks. Probably shouldn't have tested it with Portra 160, a film I so rarely use, but it was fun taking it out for a ride and seeing the looks of passersby. It's a big camera, and I used the Polaroid back, which made it look even more enormous, and the automatic winder emits this loud sound that makes it impossible not to be noticed. 

I want to go back before the rose season is over, but these are some of my favorite roses. I'd never seen roses whose buds looked so much like the peony's, so I went a little shutter happy and neglected the more traditional kind.  

Mamiya 645 Pro // Portra 160

except for middle image, shot on Fuji FP-100C. 

The Shape of Flowers

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I have a backlog of flower photos to scan, all of them shot on the Hasselblad and Polaroid back, but I know that given how many I make every week, it would be impossible to share all of them. That way, I may still have some to show here when my favorite flowers are long gone. So in the meantime, I hope you enjoy looking at these as much as I enjoyed shooting them. 

For good measure, so it's not all cut flowers, I added an image I made of a neighbor's front yard. 

Also, I was interviewed by my friend Cara for the blog Mortal Muses. I'd never been interviewed about my photography and tried my best not to sound too ditzy.  You be the judge of whether it was successful or not. 

Top diptych and middle image: 
Mamiya M645 // Fuji Reala
bottom images: 
Mamiya C220 // Portra 400

Four years

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You know the images you wanted to be making when you first started but no idea how to make? These images embody them for me. I wanted to get those tones, that kind of light & exposure, but most specifically those angles. And it never worked, no matter how hard I tried. I would stand on chairs, move around, and fail every time. Granted, I knew nothing about light, and I wasn't interested in sitting down and reading about exposure back then. I thought things would come to me in their own time, because I'd always gotten what I wanted without working very hard. I always seemed to end up figuring things out. That was foolish, and now I actually work hard to get the results I want to get, but I'm also older, and possibly wiser. The latter remains to be seen. 

And when I got these results a couple of weeks ago, there was a big sigh of relief and I slept more soundly than I have in a long time. To most people, these are just pretty flowers, but to me, they're an accomplishment four years in the making. I'm sure next month, they'll seem mundane and amateurish, but right now, right now I'm proud of these images. 

Flower studies

For years I would want to punch in the nose people who brought flowers to my house because flowers (even cut) gave me such terrible allergies. My eyes would tear up, I would sneeze all day and I swore to myself that I would dump every guy who brought me flowers. Then, I fell in love with (film) photography, and flowers didn't interest me much. I thought that because I had no interest in photographing them in their natural state that I should refrain from making photos of them altogether. Only recently did I realize how much I like to photograph them at home. And so I've been on a flower binge. Now I want to grow them in our garden so I can always have a bouquet on our dining room table. I'll just have to invest in some really strong allergy medicine come spring. 

Mamiya C220 // Portra 400