Monet. Not.

Today, we spent all day at the water-lily nursery founded by Joseph Latour-Marliac in 1875. Latour-Marliac had developed a method for hybridising lilies to produce different colours and shapes (previously, all European water lilies were white).

In 1889, Monet saw Latour-Marliac's collection at the World's Fair in Paris (the same year the Eiffel Tower was unveiled). And the rest is history. Monet bought his property in Giverny and began to develop his water garden. The Nymphéas in the Orangerie in Paris are the plants he bought from Latour-Marliac.

We were given free rein to combine all the techniques we'd been learning through the week, with the addition of polarising filters for the water. I started out with fairly conventional photos of single lilies, from above or backlit. But gradually I decided I wanted to be more painterly, and started hunting for ways of making the lilies look quite different. My favourite was to photograph them against a dark background, exposing for the lily. Then I went on a bokeh-hunt! The one I've put in my blipfolio is the least extreme of these.

We were all lilied-out by the end of the day, but it was a lovely experience. I think one of the nice things about this holiday is being able to spend all day taking photographs, so you can spend 15 minutes or more on a single photo if you want, taking it a dozen times till you're happy. All of these are more or less SOOC, though I did a bit of cropping to improve the composition -- still my weak point.