Specifically, the World Rose Festival; a large not-very-well-lit room in the bowels of Vancouver’s très chic new Convention Centre full of flowers, arrangements, and paraphernalia. Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, who’s a serious rose geek, wrote about it in The Rose Expert.
Rose people have their own vocabulary and highly-specialized sensibilities. I entirely failed to see the essential difference in quality between the “Best rose in show” (which was indeed very pretty) and a hundred others of roughly the same shape and tint. I thought a few of my own inexpertly-husbanded flowers would compare well with the show’s red-and-blue beribboned blossoms; silly me.
My favorite bit was a white sort-of hallway made of hanging sheer fabric filled end-to-end with big ambitious arrangements; the first photo is a close-up of one. The second photo is of a prize-winner, but I entirely forget the category and the color of the ribbon.
Knowing the light would be poor, I took the Sigma 30mm F1.4. It’s a lovely lens, but its laughable (by design) depth-of-field makes it devilishly difficult to work with. I consider my relationship with it as an ongoing project.
