Happy Valentines Day

A rose from my sweetheart

Happy Valentine's Day! My sweetheart actually gave me roses on Monday, and we ended up celebrating Valentine's Day on Sunday. He tried to get a different type of flower (he knows I'm partial to blue irises), but the florist only had roses and a few scraggly carnations as they were gearing up for the Big Day.

Part of me appreciates the sentiment of Valentine's Day, but the other part of me is annoyed by the commercialized, guilt-laden message that we must express our feelings on this particular day by buying something. Next year, we will celebrate Valentine's Day on January 23rd. Everything will be reasonable priced and all the restaurants will not be overbooked. While we're at it, maybe we'll move around some other holidays too. April fool's! (celebrated this year on February 14th).

The photo of the rose is taken against my ubiquitous blue wall. I used my macro lens (it hasn't gotten much use and I am still figuring it out) which was set on a tripod. The focal length was set at F22 to get the whole rose in focus. When shooting closeups the depth of field is very shallow and it can be difficult to get your entire subject in focus. Once that was all set up I set the self-timer to avoid any camera shake because the shutter speed was about 2 seconds long.