My dear friend Page gave me these dried yellow roses, which clearly had some emotional resonance, and just as clearly, needed to be decluttered out of her life. (She could compete with Marie Kondo for clearing out crap. I on the other hand have to work hard to not to approach kitty-house hoarder tendancies. We make for a good team;)

sony A7c, sony 90mm macro, f/12800, ev -2.0 1/80 sec. Shot 20dec2021. Yeah, I love this 12 thousand iso...plus a bit of messing around in post, mostly blurring out some distractions along the top edge so I keep that really vertical aspect ratio.

Since the petals were falling off even before I got the roses home, and—much as I love dried flowers (and leaves and acorns and whatnot) that I think I will paint beautifully detailed watercolours of, what actually happens is they sit around collecting dust till Autumn (or even Winter) rolls around again and I've done nothing, so out they go—and these weren't even mine!

ISO 1250, f2.8, ev -1.7, 1/100 sec. —But a whole lot more futzing around in gimp, as I wanted to emphasize the petals and de-emphasize the table. Most of the ‘art’ in this image is, I'm sorry to say, in the lovely lens than in my image-editing skills.

In a photograph I felt I could, far better than keeping the actual falling-apart flowers, capture he melancholy that caused my friend to save them till they dried, yet understand they were still fading. Certainly creating a photographic memorial (however badly) was vastly preferable to resenting the fact they were falling apart, and I wasn't able to summon the heroic efforts to prevent that; nor would my friend have wanted me to: we have a no-harm no-foul aspect to this exchange of stuff, the idea being, if you can figure out something cool, great; if not, well, we tried.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.