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The Beauty Of Old Things
23 July 2018
When we got in the car, we were planning on driving to the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park but we found ourselves going, instead, to Fisherman's Wharf. And on the way, we surprised ourselves even more by stopping at the Palace of Fine Arts.
Fiore. A flower in the sunlight.
That's the sort of adventure you have when you have guests in town.
As we wandered around the Palace of Fine Arts on a gorgeous, clear, sunny day, we almost walked right by a flower spotlit by the sun in the shade of the palace's imposing columns. The contrast of the flower in sun amid the shade immediately appealed to us.
No, it did not look like this. It was just a bright flower with greenery all around it.
But you know how camera sensors are. They see what they want to see. And our Nikon D200 didn't see the greenery. Just the flower.
The tonality and color data in a Raw file always needs to be rendered one way or another. We liked this a little underexposed. And we took the Rubber Stamp tool to it to erase a distracting stem in the background.
We liked the brownish leaf shooting up behind the flower and the bright green stem below it (we didn't want it floating on air). And we appreciated the faded colors, matching the building itself.
We just had to crop it so it sat right in the frame. A very quick edit.
The architect Bernard Maybeck described the palace as "beauty tempered by sadness" and certainly a stunning flower that inevitably withers reflects the beauty of the caryatids on the ramparts looking for their soldiers to return, many of whom sadly would not.
The muted color of this flower suggests the fading to come but is also a reminder of the persistent value of some old things. Like truth. And beauty.
That's the sort of adventure you have when your itinerary suddenly changes.