Valentine ~ Original 6 foot tall bouquet by Yukiko sets theme for buffet at Smith Ranch Homes

Tall quince bouquet shown above is installed for Valentine’s  in Smith Ranch’s high ceiling dining room, on a buffet counter top — soon to be surrounded with trays of food and beverages.

In homes with regular ceilings, 5′ or 6′ bouquets are often positioned on  large coffee tables.

Either way, Yukiko’s tall designs establish the theme and tone for gatherings of friends and parties.

Residents at Smith Ranch look forward to a new five-foot bouquet at the center of their buffet everyweek.  And here it is for Valentine’s Day.

Valentine Bouquet Five-footer

South Anerican roses, local quince, lilies and “wax flowers” provide the color and the texture of this floral design.  You can also see a selection of other five-footers on my website.

How We Photograph Big Flower Arrangements in Bad Light

• First, we use an antique digital camera, Nikon CoolPix 5000, updated with the manufacturer’s software patch to enable shooting in RAW. Our CoolPix 5000 is one of the oldest, lightest RAW shooters around.  Luckily so, because RAW processing is important for this.
• Next, in an ideal world we would secure the camera to our expensive tripod for shooting.  Got tripod but the buffet is too busy to set it up.  Likewise, to set-up a few studio lights, no way.  So, here’s what we do:
• Set the camera’s file size to RAW and its digital ISO to 800 (yep, eight hundred — makes the picture noisy, speckles, but there’s a reliable way to fix that).
• Set the camera’s other controls to “auto,” but NO flash.
• Then, select the person with the steadiest hands (Yukiko) to sit with her elbows on the table opposite the bouquet and very slowly, lightly squeeze off three or four shots.  In our experience at least one of the four will be sufficiently steady and clear to let us work-up a decent image,
• For photo-editing we use PhotoshopCS (nearly as old as our flower camera) RAW processing, primarily to adjust the light on the bouquet.
• One of the early steps is to use the Noise Ninja plugin (user installed in PhotoshopCS) to reduce or eliminate the noise so that no speckles are apparent to the human eye.  I learned this technique in landscape and wildlife photography where outdoor light is often poor, especially in early morning.
• And then we do the conventional photo edits, selective adjustments (especially where the light is still falling poorly), cropping, sizing, sharpening, etc.

It may seem like an awful lot of trouble at first, but once you get the hang of it, it goes pretty quickly.

Check-out this year’s five-foot Valentine Bouquet, above, and share your comments below.

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Early Monday morning we received our first phishing e-mail of this week — the sender showed as a national florist, but the subject line began with “FW…” and the message invited us to open the attached photo for a $19.99 flower offer for Valentine’s.

Our Yahoo! spam filter determined that the actual sender was different from the florist named as the sender.  So, it filtered this message (and its lethal attachment) into the Spam folder — from which we deleted it.

The attachment is the part that may either invade your computer looking for your credit card information — or it may link you to a website which asks you to enter your credit card or financial information.  Either way it’s a bad deal for good people.

So, what?  So, watch out.  The e-mail arrived among many Valentine’s Day special offers from the usual national florists and syndicates.  A quick look might fail to pick it out as a dangerous phishing probe.