Angry Mob in a Rose Garden
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 8:57PM About seventy of my coworkers and I volunteered at the Google Serve 2011 today. We went to the San Jose Rose Garden, weeded, deadheaded, and swept the rose petals. Rose Garden is a volunteer maintained garden that was created in 1932. Although the volunteer list is very long, only about a dozen of regulars come to work in garden almost every day. Some already spent over 1700 hours trimming the roses.
It was insanely hot, insanely bright, and I struggled to photograph in such harsch light conditions. I desperately searched for shaded areas, and was forced to shoot most of the photos against the sun, blowing up the background for the sake of properly exposed faces. Here are few of my favorites:
We split into small groups, each group taking care of one part of the garden. I photographed all groups in a "angry village mob" fashion. We did not have pitchforks, but the rakes looked equally as intimidating. This is the most convincing angry mob group of the day:
The photo of union hands was a co-worker's idea. I love it!
Susan working her magic with these lucky roses.
Finding our groups of Googlers was very hard since they were kneeling so close to the ground. I had to walk around bushes to discover Googlers to photograph.
Herb is one of the regular volunteers at the Rose Garden. He collected a lot of star pins -- each representing ten hours of volunteering.
This is my favorite rose shot of the day. Which shot did you like?
The rest of the photos can be found here.
Reader Comments (2)
Wow, great pictures. The one with Matt Williams about to bite that rose is among my favorite for the theme.
The fifth picture resembles Arboretum in Tesarske Mlynany, Slovakia -- the layout, not the volunteers :). The sixth and ninth ones are really impressive. It seems like a rewarding job to capture the events of Google staff!