Reflected Rose

Guess who is late for Valentine's Day? After a flurry of hearts and flowere, the last thing you wanted to see, I'm sure, is another rose but I simply couldn't resist this one which was presented to Mrs. Joesblips by the manager of the reataurant in which we had our St.Valentine's night dinner.

I was amazed by the state of the town on the night. I expected there to be a bit of a romantic buzz about the place. Our restaurant had put in a bit of an effort. Red hearts hanging from their more usual Oriental decor and a rose and chocolates for each of the ladies. The result was, just four couples turned up!!. Another restuarant close by were doing a 4 course dinner for 2, complete with a bottle of wine and a box of Belgian Chocolates for the all in price of 55 Euro. They had just one couple in as far as I could see.

After the meal we decided to do the rounds of the pubs. Of the 7 we looked into, 5 had no customers at all, 1 had just two guys at the bar and the last one had a good crowd of men all cheering loudly at a football match on the TV. The romantic atmosphere was nil, zilch, none. We gave up and went home. This country is on the floor and dying fast.

Edit: Yesterday I was asked why I used a very small aperture for my blip. It was of course in order to maximise the depth of field. Just in case you are wondering why today's was shot at only f5.6, the answer lies in the camera. Today I used a compact which has a much smaller sensor and correspondingly much shorter focal length of lens. At a guess my working aperture today would be roughly the equivalent of f16 on a regular DSLR camera. These compacts are wonderful if you need maximum depth of field but on the flip side they are next to useless if you need to make the depth very shallow in order to throw a background out od focus.