All of the large, singular rose pictures you see here were photographs that I took at the San Francisco Rose Garden in Golden Gate Park in August of 2006. I had a lovely trip to SF that weekend, and the friends I was staying with lived very close to the DeYoung Museum and Rose Garden areas.

I have what is now an older Fuji FinePix digital camera. The summer overcast of San Francisco often makes very even and shadow-free light for shooting outdoors, and this day was no exception. No flash required. One of these days I'm going to remember to bring my tripod along.

One thing I'm always wary of with really modern roses is that some of them have had all the smell bred right out of them. To me, a rose shouldn't have too faint a scent, nor should it be overwhelming. It's ok if standing in a rose garden on a sunny day there's a heady rose aroma, but I don't want a vase of roses that can stun from across the room.

A very beautiful and popular park wedding site in reality, the Rose Garden in Golden Gate Park was once used as a location on the television show "Millennium," the psycho-horror series from X-Files creator Chris Carter. In one first season episode, illegally dumped human cremains are found on the site, the victims of a criminal syndicate that offs people by trapping them inside a large, industrial microwave oven and then incinerating them alive. Ashes are beneficial to roses, so the criminals were disposing of the remains in the garden, hoping no one would notice they were not wood ash.