RE: [Leica] Pleasing flower pictures?!?

["R. Saylor" <rlsaylor@ix.netcom.com>]

An image of a flower usually has minimal intrinsic interest. As I 
believe Mark Rabiner noted, the real flower is better. That being 
said, I do flower pictures occasionally, but the subject is not the 
flower as such, it is the impression the flower makes on the mind. 
When, for example, you see a particularly nice specimen of a rose, 
your mind extracts it from its environment so that you are only aware 
of a pattern of tonal values divorced from the very plant which makes 
it what it is. To mimic what the mind does, I may use a very narrow 
depth of field so that the rose is separated from its background. This 
is surely a technical trick, but it is not technique for the sake of 
technique. Rather, it is using the camera to produce an image which 
represents what is in the mind's eye.

Richard