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the various and sundry creations of sylvus tarn
Dogwood,
beloved worldwide

The American Dogwood, Cornus florida, is not only beloved in the US, but by gardeners worldwide. The trees come in three colours, white, pink and red, of which white is my favourite. Technically, the flowers are the lime green centers, as the pink or white ‘petals’ are actually bracts.

white dogwood, pixel pro 6. scaled in gimp.

This specimen has particularly broad bracts (petals) and I like the contrast with the carved stone.

pink dogwood, 16apr2024. assorted selection tools, blurring, erasure, merging; cropped and scaled to 4000 pixels in gimp

But pink is very popular in Japan, or at least the parts of Kyoto where I was staying.

And it stands as a testament of care by an ordinary Japanese residence for a really lovely specimen.

This image (above) I did do a lot of image editing on to soften the brick background, and it's still not great, but since the main point of this image is to provide reference material for dyeing and embroidery designs without copyright issues, that's okay:)

pink dogwood, 19apr2024. This actually combines two similar images to get more of the flowers in sharp focus. Edited & scaled in gimp.

I'm kind of proud of this one: I had two very similar shots of the same dogwood, three days later, but with slightly differing focus; I liked the composition of the first image better, but the three flowers dead center in the image were out of focus; so I clipped the sharp version and slotted them in, giving the both of best worlds. Then I had to fix the blurry doubles, mostly by clipping parts of the background & moving them around (since the shots were taken at ever so slightly different angles). No doubt an experienced graphic artist could spot my changes immediately, but the image looks less obviously edited to me;) But as I said, these are primarily reference shots, not art photography, and all this messing around is to make them “prettier”.[1]

pale pink dogwoods, pixel pro 6, 26apr2024; scaled to 4000 pixels

This shot, of much paler pink dogwood shot on the 26th, is out of the box. Dogwood tends to be shown with the flowers shown closed (as for example in the first 3 shots) but in this image the flowers (centers) have opened, with tiny pistils or stamens sticking out of them.

[1]The original versions are actually more useful, but as the plan is to incorporate these into a Kyoto style kimono design, it doesn't matter, as Kyoto style is pretty stylized.


tags:

[travel] [flora] [Japan] [2024]