As many times as I photograph roses I never have enough! There is always a different way to approach a rose, or any other flower for that matter. Verily, there is a world and a universe in a single bloom if you look hard enough.

With this red rose, it came home with me following the December Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshop I just gave. This was a great workshop, with good participants and I had a lot of fun. (By the way, there’s still some room in the February 2014 session of Photographing Flowers for Transparency.)

So essentially, the decision to photograph this particular rose was a bit random. But when I saw the internal curves of this specimen I could not resist. Let’s face it, roses are just so sexy.

To make this image, I put the rose in a vase in a shaft of sunlight. I used a small silver reflector to bounce some light back into the center of the flower.

With my camera on a tripod, I then used my Zeiss 100mm f/2 macro lens to make a bracketed sequence of exposures at f/22 and ISO 100. To make the final image, I used two exposures, one shot at 2 seconds and the other at 4 seconds, combined in Photoshop using layers, layer masks, and the Brush Tool.

If you are interested in my approach to flower photography, please consider my online Photographing Flowers course. This is an ongoing course that you can take on your own time. Click here to register for my course.

My book The Way of the Digital Photographer contains a great deal of information about how to work with flower photos in Photoshop.  I am excited that my book has recently been named a best photography book of the year. Click here to read the press release, click here to purchase my book on Amazon, and click here to purchase it directly from the publisher (Peachpit).