These photos didn't last long on Red Bubble. I posted them a little more than two weeks ago. I left them up on the front page for an extra week, and they still couldn't muster as many views as the point-and-shoot photos I took last summer and didn't enter into any Red Bubble groups. The other two photos I posted around the same time had no problem getting views... so I guess the Red Bubble crowd just didn't like this quirky little flower.

These pictures are both the same flower. They were taken only a couple of days apart... I was amazed by how different the flower looked once it had lost its petals. I almost overlooked the flower the first time because it was shaded by a bunch of dense green foliage... Hence the greenish cast to its petals that the Red Bubble folk may have pooh-pooh'ed. I liked the detail in the centre of the flower and its "hairy" stem.

I'm actually a bit offended that nobody liked the second photo. Usually when I convert something into monochrome, it's to get rid of something bright and distracting in the background, or to make something look older or more simple. In this case, I just imagined it as a black-and-white photo right from the start. I like the fact that the stem in the foreground is blurred while the flower in the background is in sharp focus.

Maybe these photos really do suck. Maybe they're just too avant garde for the folks on Red Bubble.