Even the blandest flower can be spiced up.  Take for instance this unspectacular shot of dahlias:

I had decided to throw it away, but instead transferred it to a folder on my desktop that said “Flowers Unused.” It’s where I put things I have considered using in my blog but haven’t—either because I found one I liked better or meant to use but lost on my desktop or ones that I’m just saving. Sometimes I put things there just because I don’t know where else to put them… or they wind up there by accident when they should have gone into the file of photos already used in my blog.

I checked and found it was fair game. I’d never used it in a blog post. On the other hand, it was so unspectacular that I was a bit embarrassed to use it, even when cropped down to a single flower. So, I played around a bit and ended up with this:

Pretty fuzzy, but some interesting shapes, shadows and shades. Still not blogworthy, though, so I played around some more and got this:

and this:

and this:

and finally, this:

All of these photos came from the first photo shown, making use of only cropping, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, temperature, tint and sharpness settings—the basic tools in the edit function of Photos—the app on Mac that replaced iPhoto. Pretty fun. Like making a tasty new dish from leftovers in the fridge that anyone else would have tossed out.

https://ceenphotography.com/2016/05/09/flower-of-the-day-may-10-2016-bearded-iris/