Winter’s Festival by Willard Leroy Metcalf, 1913

Bouquets to Art has assigned me to design my bouquet to this American Impressionist painting, Winter’s Festival.
This winter scene by Willard Metcalf shows an unusual and elusive color technique. When you look at it in person, the snow veils the green and russet colors of the landscape.
Yet, digital images of the painting in the de Young museum’s database (and elsewhere on the internet) strip aside most of the white snow and reveal harmonies of color and details of the wild. So, I wondered, “what’s going on here?”

Reading further into the internet commentary, I learned that Willard Metcalf was influenced by both Claude Monet (he visited Monet in Givenchy) and James Abbott McNeil Whistler. I see the Monet influence in Metcalf’s treatments of the russets and greens (especially apparent in the digital catalog images) and the influence of Whistler in the veil of snow when you see the original oil painting hung on the museum wall.

So, here’s my plan for the design of my bouquet to this piece of art: I will think about it while I collect winter branches, leaves and flowers. I have until March 16th to get it right.

Meanwhile, you may want to check out Willard Leroy Metcalf’s Winter’s Festival in the Image Base of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums or use the software of the Amica Library.

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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