If I had taken good photos of the individual roses alive in their East Bay garden on their various branches I would have used them. And I should have had several, because I took plenty. But in the end was not satisfied with most of the results, mainly due to focusing issues. Not that the results were downright fuzzy, just not startling sharp. And (as so often in the recent past) this technical weakness suggested the next direction for more and better new-camera efforts, viz the manual focus ring on the lens itself. The digital SLR has such sophisticated auto-focus capabilities of its own that up to now I have left it to its own choices while I fiddled with aperture size, shutter speed, white balance and ISO. Now that those can be handled more smoothly, it is time to slow down again and refine the focus by hand at the last instant before pressing that all-powerful button (keeping in mind that this is good advice for flowers but impossible advice on most occasions when Mabel Watson Payne is my subject, because even though she is more beautiful than any rose, she is also a great deal more animated).
Note on Text: Stumbled this morning (still half asleep) on a layout that allows space for significantly larger prints on-screen than formerly, so now feel I have at last gained something I actually wanted after a weekend of frustrated griping about this new Blogger format. But cannot be sure how this change will display on other people's devices. If there are problems (or conversely if no difference is apparent) I trust the daily loyalists to let me know.