Garden Roses And My Lightroom Editing Recipe.

Hello my fellow garden lovers, how are you? So another heatwave looks like it’s about to wrap around us and I must admit, I’m slightly worried about the open garden at the end of the month. Will I still have flowers 🤔 and how crispy will they be… Anyway, worrying aside for a moment, yesterday the roses were looking glorious and I had the urge to cut some for a simple romantic display- still to enjoy in the garden, but I find the act of snipping and arranging very relaxing. I also wanted to place something on my new vintage trestle table that’s sitting in the french shed at the moment.

Now I don’t go in for perfection when making an arrangement, I like it to still look relaxed like it’s still growing, therefore I’ll leave roses on the stem in various stages from bud to flowers with just one petal still hanging on. The petal detritus on the table pleases me and adds to the charm.

It didn’t take long to put together, I selected a pretty cut glass jug as I wanted to create something with lots of light. Sniffing each one as I go, my mind wanders off in many directions but in a nice way- not like when it’s 3am and you wonder if you’ll ever sleep again. No, these are what I call productive thoughts, when you properly switch off and then things naturally enter your head, sometimes there’s a moment of ‘oooo that’s interesting, why haven’t I though of that before’ whilst other things can be filed away, or scribbled in a notebook for later. Speaking of which, I always have at least five notebooks on the go at any one time.

Summer in my opinion, is for roses, the most romantic flower of them all. From the start of May the first blooms bring much anticipation and happiness. I daren’t cut them at first but eventually I’ll snip one for a vintage bottle by the bed, then before I know it they’re all blooming so I don’t feel as guilty about chopping them for arrangements.

Styling with flowers is my favourite thing to do, the act of arranging and placing flowers somewhere in the home or garden is very therapeutic and I love to take lots of pics of them. The best camera is the one you have with you and as I really couldn’t be bothered to march up to the house it was my phone I pulled out my back pocket to get snap happy with. Photographing flowers is an incredibly mindful practice, I could quite happily lose myself for a good hour. First I’ll step back and take one shot, give it an assessing glance then I’ll faff- or style if you like. In that first image- I can see if I want things moving slightly or if there is anything in the frame that I hadn’t noticed and is causing a distraction. I may at this point bring in props but for this little shoot I wanted the focus on the flowers and the trestle table, I left the snips in the shot as they were my nans and I quite like that link between garden flowers as a cut arrangement.

I really like shooting on my phone, I have an iPhone 15 I think but I could get the same results with the models right back to a 10. On this model, I’ll start by opening the camera app, then I’ll tap where it says photo,