Have you ever seen something from afar and thought it was amazing, down right magical in fact?  Then you actually get there and it's not at all what you expected.  Well, these photos sum an experience from this last weekend.  There's a store that sells these these faux flowers that light up in the center.  I've never been in the store, only seen it from the outside at night.  I thought this store was amazing and it was filled with all these glowing orbs of floral wonder.  Flash forward to the day time and most of the store is knick knacks and random things, with only a handful of these flowers and the flowers seem so fake.  Here where photo magic happens.

Photo one: shallow depth of field to blur out the details of the flowers and lights.  Best way to describe what I wanted to do was an impressionist painting...capture the light, massive amounts of color and contrast, but ignore the details.

Photo two: I wanted to capture that essence of entire room filled with antique, warm, glowing, inviting flowers at night...you know the magic...like a scene from Ferngully or Tinklebell the Princess Story or something like that that I got when I saw the flowers before.  I found an old mirror in the store with a few of the glowing flowers in front of it.  I took a photo of these flowers and it's reflection inorder to double the amount of flowers and lights I had and to use as a sort of frame for my flowers.  I had to lean over a table to knick knacks to get this photo and try to hide myself from the reflection.  I underexposed this photo a little too by shortening the shutterspeed.  I wanted to recreate that sense of night and wonder that I always get walking past that shop.  I wanted to get the top of the frame in there, but if I did I would have cut out the yellow flowers at the bottom or smashed into a statue of a angel or fairy or fairy angel.  This would have been a good time for a little wider angle lens (I don't have one though).  But i think the photo does alright without it. 

Any thoughts?  If you've been to that store (it's the one on the pier in Monterey) what do you think?  Does it capture the store?