Peony magic

The tree Peony (Paeonia suffruticosa) that we have in our garden does not look great this year. The weather has been enormously dry this spring and the leaves of the bush are partly dry as well. Also the buds and flowers have been fading quickly. My son noticed yesterday that one of the lower growing branches was broken so I cut it off entirely and put into a little vase at home. It looked tempting to be captured and eventually I used it and another even more faded flower for my still life photography.

Funnily enough, I ended up with quite a different photo than I started with… Isn’t the creative process itself fascinating, taking your hand and leading you hither and thither?

I added some textures to make the background more interesting… They softened the feel, didn’t they?

Here is another version of the photo, more heavily manipulated with digital double exposure, I find it almost abstract…

The last picture is the photo from the beginning of this post processed as a triptych.

I enjoyed enormously this “peony session”… Isn’t it sort of unbelievable how such a fading flower can make a person feel alive? Makes me wonder…