For a special birthday in Marin, her parents called us from their home in beautiful Brittany.  A series  of telephone calls and e-mails set the guiding tone as soft yellow, spring, peach.   For this, Yukiko designed the bouquet below:   peach roses with a subtle accent of “wax” flowers, magnolia leaves, nandina leaves and Hawthorne foliage.

The tone is a reflection, a reminder of the daughter’s favorite flowers and colors as she was growing up.

BTW,  you probably knew this already, but I’ll write it here anyway: “wax” flowers are not wax;  they are real flowers with a waxy coating deep inside.

Yukiko has created many more ikebana designs than there is space to show them on her website.  This week we had to take down one strikingly beautiful ikebana to make space for the newest design.  Here they are:

We Took Down This Picture…

Ikebana with Bamboo and Dogwood – seasonal supply of dogwood is presently difficult.

To Make Page Space Available for This Picture

Ikebana of Orchids in October – designed with green cymbidium with phalaenopsis accent.

To have a place for every unique ikebana design by Yukiko, we are expanding our Ikebana Gallery to include online resources from Flickr. 

As we develop this approach we will keep you informed through this blog.

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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