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Friday Slide Show: Bouquets To Art 2018
16 March 2018
We risked our life yesterday to present this slide show to you today. Not only did we navigate the city streets during a torrential downpour, but we survived the crush of visitors to the de Young Museum for Bouquets to Art 2018.
The annual show, now in its 34th year, invites florists from San Francisco to Tokyo to create their own masterpieces inspired by the museum's permanent works of art. Proceeds from Bouquets to Art help to underwrite exhibitions, conservation projects and education programs at the Fine Arts Museums.
This year's show runs from March 13 through March 18 but when we visited on March 15, some of the floral arrangements were already starting to show signs of decay.
It's hard to blame them.
There are so many people admiring the arrangements that the heat and humidity is less than ideal. Perhaps to balance the odds, the displays were not well lit this year. Many of the paintings, oddly enough, were more brightly lit than the flowers.
On top of that, each year the task seems to become more daunting for the designers. Many of this year's pieces simply provided a nice bouquet inspired by the color palette of the painting. The imagination that usually delights us was in very short supply.
Centerpiece. Don't ask us, we're just passing through.
Still, we managed to take 115 shots, offering 32 of them here and 57 full-resolution images in our Google album. We do that so those who can't make it to the show can still enjoy it.
And they may enjoy it here a lot more than they might at the show.
This year there was one session in which photography was prohibited. Last year there were three. But the verdict is in: people want to take photos of the flowers.
We didn't do much of a count but every display we saw was surrounded by at least three smartphones. We did see one digicam and three dSLRs during our two-hour visit but that was it.
We saw even fewer men.
And don't think this was all kids taking selfies with the bouquets. Nope. All age groups were implicated. One elderly woman was miffed that her phone was focused on her. "How did that happen?" she wondered back at the front-facing camera.
Smile!. Volunteers took photos with visitors' smartphones in front of a floral frame this year.
She could have used some help from the volunteers with bouquets in their hair taking photos with visitors' smartphones in the lobby.
Like last year, we used a Micro Four Thirds camera with a 14-42mm zoom. The job requires a zoom. And we really appreciated the articulated electronic viewfinder, which helped us get better angles on some of the low shots.
We could have used a sensor with a higher ISO that didn't exhibit noise. And we could have used a larger sensor to have more latitude with our depth of field.
Noise we handled in Lightroom. Depth of field made some shots and lost others.
We didn't sync any of the images in Lightroom, preferring to evaluate each on its own. Even the white balance changed from one room to another. And most of these images required the Guided mode of the Upright tool, too. So that took a while this morning.
But here you have it. Stop a moment and pretend to smell the flowers.
