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Friday Slide Show: Bouquets to Art 2011
10 July 2026
We took an Olympus XZ-1 digicam to the 2011 exhibit of Bouquets to Art. The exhibit is the creation of local florists, designers and garden clubs who assemble a bouquet to one or another of the de Young Museum's paintings and sculptures in the permanent collection.
The XZ-1 featured a 28-112mm equivalent zoom with Zuiko glass and a 10-Mp sensor, so it was no slouch. You can find one in good condition these days for $280 t $380. Cell phones were not quite as capable as a digicam in those days.
So we didn't have to dodge dozens of iPhones to get these shots. In later years the photography became quite intrusive and the museum began limiting it to certain days. But in 2011, there was less of that.
There were 150 installations and, though we missed a few rooms, we still managed to see about 100 of them. It was exhausting. And crowded, even if most people were not taking photos.
The XZ-1 had as reputation for poor JPEGs but all these shots were captured as JPEGs. The lighting was harsh with spotlights on the floral arrangements while the painting bathed in more moderate illumination, as museums like to do to protect the pigments.
We threw the JPEGs at Lightroom Classic to get these images. And, as you may remember, Lightroom Classic can process JPEGs in Adobe Camera Raw.
We started each edit with an Auto correction but we generally preferred the camera capture. The two tweaks we always made were to kick up the Dehaze setting and open up the Shadows. That kept the general look of the capture but let us see what was in the darker parts of the image.
Tough subjects. Extreme lighting. But the Lightroom edits of these Olympus digicam shots refresh these flowers that faded long ago.
For comparison, you can see how we did in subsequent years with different cameras:
- Bouquets to Art 2018
- Bouquets to Art 2017
- The Fading Bouquets
- Bouquets to Art 2016
- Bouquets to Art 2015
- Bouquets to Art 2014
Which shows that we featured the exhibit regularly until 2018. That, we seem to recall, was when smart phones began to infect the experience, making it impossible to photograph the exhibit. It was always popular, full of people, but you could wait out the crowd to get the angle you wanted. Some people even apologized for stepping in front of you back them.
Then the hoards descended with their smart phones and the museum had to restrict photography to just a couple of days. Which unfortunately meant no amount of patience would get you a clear shot.
Covid didn't help matters, of course. But the real culprit was the smart phone.
So the exhibit, like its flowers, blossomed for a while before fading away from sight.
