Day 225

The hibiscus is finally blooming for us. It bloomed in the winter for Barbara in her classroom but in the 3 or 4 years we've had it it's never bloomed at home since the first year. It would need all summer to recover from being in our dark and coal-smokey house and then it was time to come in again and lose all its leaves in horror all over again.

This past year I took it to Barbara's school so it could be inside and have sunlight and warmth and it apparently had really giant flowers after all that time because Barbara says these ones are smaller. I'm happy to see them anyway and there are a lot of other buds waiting to bloom.

The reds are just too intense for my camera. It doesn't hurt my eyes to look at the flowers but it seems to blind my phone. I have noticed that with other red/pink things like the time I took pictures of roses. I thought it had something to do with the cloudy lighting making things more intense but you can see it's sunny in these pictures.

The two flower picture is the one I sent out on twitter but I'll share all three with you. I used a faded effect on the pictures to make the flower have definition like visible wrinkles and such. I've never used it before and I think it was pretty good for making reds less intense but it washes out the greens which I don't like as much. I need I use more tools, it's not like I'm really trying to record reality with these photographs so I might as well experiment a bit more with what can be done.