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2025 Trip Chronicles: Contents
San Jose Municipal Rose Garden 4/23
San Jose Municipal Rose Garden 4/24
San Jose Municipal Rose Garden 4/26
San Jose Municipal Rose Garden 4/27
San Jose Municipal Rose Garden 4/28
My sixth year working this beautiful city garden that is a 3.7-mile drive from my residence, which I began visiting at the start of the pandemic after the county shelter-in-place directive. The dark red text elements are taken directly from the garden website's QR Codes page of cultivar descriptions. Unfortunately, due to a laptop failure that left me without a computer for 2 months, I was not able to recall detailed descriptions for most roses below. Link to map of the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden (SJMRG) that is at Naglee and Dana Avenue:
San Jose Municipal Rose Garden map
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My first day at the rose garden was on the morning of Wednesday, April 23, 2025. The above cultivar, Elle rose, was my third subject at 8:23am PDT with a deeply shadowed ground background.
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Another cultivar, Elle rose, with a more classic center-curled rose form at 9:01am.
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I returned the following day on Thursday, April 24, 2025, when, at 8:52am, I worked on the above Cinco de Mayo cultivar rose subject. These roses, with petals that spread out without order, grow in the largest dense clusters of flowers within the garden.
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Worked above Melody Parfumee cultivar rose subject at 8:02am on Saturday April 26, 2025, at SJMRG plot 117. The water drops are from overnight water sprinklers. Likely used my collapsible 32-inch circular diffuser.
Cultivar name: Melody Parfumee. Grandiflora, mauve or purple blend, lighter reverse. Flowers dark lavender-plum with lighter reverse. Strong, damask, old rose fragrance. 25 to 30 petals. Average diameter 4.5". Large, full (26-40 petals), cluster-flowered, in large clusters, high-centered bloom form. Blooms in flushes throughout the season. Medium, bushy, upright. Medium, glossy, dark green foliage. Height of 4' to 5' (120 to 150 cm).
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Another wet from sprinklers, Melody Parfumee cultivar rose shot at 8:13am.
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And at my favorite plot at 8:31am, a Rainbow Sorbet cultivar rose.
The a6700 ran off 50 shots, reaching my Settings, Focus Bracket limit. Only 25 shots were used to process the image, with many of the deleted shots focused on shadowed leaves and stems below the flower. In most cases, 50 shots won't bring all such close-up subject shadow areas all the way to the ground into focus. So I just use a single dark, out-of-focus shot to blur all those frame areas. If part of that background is in some sunlight, I'll use my body or my collapsible silver reflector disk to block that light. At times, background sunlight on ground areas is impossible to block, and if so, I may not attempt to work a subject.
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Next at 9:32am is a somewhat similar Mardi Gras cultivar rose. The a6700 ran off 39 shots before ending its sequence; however, only 20 were used, with the last 19 shots not focusing on any part of the illuminated subject.
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I was back again the next morning on Sunday April 27, 2025. At 9:18am, I worked the above unidentified cultivar rose that was likely an Elle or Mardi Gras rose.
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This unbalanced frame of Rainbow Sorbet cultivar roses with its leaves at the center was shot at 9:26am. Note the right rose was wet from sprinklers, while those on the left were not.
At page top, a wet Mardi Gras cultivar rose
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Much later at 10:53am, a wet Mardi Gras cultivar rose with a particularly nice effect from the water droplets. Many mornings, I find breezes calm early that then go through a period where they increase to levels making work tedious, waiting for lulls, so I'll leave. On a few other mornings, given my weather experience, I may patiently wait and see if breezes balance out again later in the morning, as sometimes happens. A sign that may happen is on mornings when low-elevation overnight marine overcast clouds seem static. If I see those clouds moving above more than a small amount, I know it is likely only a bit more time until the wind reaches ground level.
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A wet Perfect Moment cultivar rose shot at 11:15am.
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The next morning, the marine overcast was gone. So I returned early on sunny Monday, April 28, 2025. The above worked at 7:45am is an All That Jazz cultivar rose up in blue sky. These are some of the largest roses in the garden. On most days in past years, the garden gates opened after 8am except on Saturday. This is the first year that, apparently, a new group of city park workers began arriving earlier, so they opened the 5 gates earlier; that is a boon to my work.
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At 7:55am, a yellow-hued Julia Child cultivar rose up in the blue sky. I often use my 32-inch collapsible circular silver reflector to help illuminate this kind of subject.
With a light yellow or white petal subject, due to the limited camera sensor dynamic range, the sky will render somewhat unnaturally dark. Leaving it dark will still look aesthetic, though unnatural. So in this case, I chose to lighten the sky in Photoshop, which requires a fair amount of work, as shown below. If the image was just going to be used for the web, the result of brightening the sky would look fine as is. But at 100% pixels, noise in the sky and dark halos on petal edges would be obvious. The below serves as an example of how working on large, great-detail images is different than web-sized images. It is not something one can read about online or take a class on, but rather requires experience.
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An Elle cultivar rose up in the blue sky at 8:26am. Note the out-of-focus sky elements that are trees in the distance beyond the Focus Bracket range. Although I could remove those areas by filling them with adjacent sky colors, which would indeed improve the image aesthetics, I don't do so per my long-standing, consistent chosen natural style of what was experienced.
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And another Elle cultivar rose with more yellow petal areas at 8:35am.
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At 9:01am a Rainbow Sorbet cultivar cluster of roses up in the blue sky.
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Koco Loko cultivar rose. The light chocolate color develops from an earlier light purple phase that can still be seen on some petal edges.
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An Ingrid Bergman cultivar rose up in the blue sky. Note the light blue halo on some petal edges. That artifact is not on the full 100% pixels image but rather is the result of the severe downsizing for this unimportant web version. That could be fixed; however, there are always trivial artifacts in downsized versions that have lower-quality JPG settings in order to keep file sizes lower, providing lower page loading bandwidths. The only important images worth reducing artifacts within are the 100% pixels originals.
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A more reddish-than-usual Hot Coco cultivar rose.
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2025 Trip Chronicles: Contents
