A Brief Flourish

The Rose and the Amaranth

AN AMARANTH planted in a garden near a Rose-Tree, thus addressed it: "What a lovely flower is the Rose, a favorite alike with Gods and with men. I envy you your beauty and your perfume." The Rose replied, "I indeed, dear Amaranth, flourish but for a brief season! If no cruel hand pluck me from my stem, yet I must perish by an early doom. But thou art immortal and dost never fade, but bloomest for ever in renewed youth."

- Æsop

The freesias are coming out, which makes me happy. They're absolutely gorgeous flowers. One the one hand, it seems a pity that they bloom so very briefly, but on reflection I think in fact that the fleeting nature of these is part of what makes them so lovely. The same goes for cherry blossom and the beautiful flowers of the jacaranda (both of which will be showing themselves in our garden in the next couple of months).

If they were there for longer, I suspect we wouldn't appreciate them quite so much.

Here it is large.

I used Filterstorm on my iPad to pull down the bottom of the luminance curve, applied with a mask (a gradient mask brighter around the central freesias, and then erasing the mask completely from that central spray) so as to highlight the central flowers by slightly darkening the background. I then pulled down the bottom of the RGB curves with a mask painted onto those same freesias in order to bring out their colour a bit more.

Edit/addit: I'm kind of chuffed at what was my photo for one year ago today (thumbnail bottom right of the page) ;-)

Lumix DMC-G10 : f/5.60 : 1/59" : 24 mm : ISO 320