### Purple bouquets in Phuket: the colour a camera argues with Someone photographs the bouquet, looks at the screen and says the flowers have come out blue. Nothing has gone wrong with the bouquet. Purple sits at the end of the visible range where phone sensors are least reliable, and the software deciding what a picture should look like tends to resolve that uncertainty towards blue. Anyone who has tried to photograph lavender in a garden already knows the effect. The shift is strongest on saturated violet under bright light, which is exactly the light most of these bouquets are photographed in here. Deep purple loses its red side and comes back as a flat royal blue with no variation across the petal, and the veining that made the flower worth holding disappears. Pale lilac survives much better. Automatic white balance makes it worse again. The phone corrects for the largest light source in the frame, so a warm restaurant pushes everything cool in compensation and the bouquet lands somewhere it never was. One shot near a window in daylight with the flash off is worth more than ten taken over dinner. There is a second problem in photographs, and it applies to mixed bouquets. Purple and burgundy read as the same tone once an image has been compressed, so a carefully built two colour bunch arrives on a screen as a single dark mass. #### Where the pictures get taken here Most of what we deliver in this colour gets photographed within an hour of arriving, and where that happens decides how much of the work survives: - A hotel room in Patong, Kata, Karon or Kamala, usually shot on the bed or a desk under a ceiling light, which is the worst case for a saturated tone. - A villa terrace in Bang Tao or Surin, where daylight does the job properly and nothing needs correcting. - A restaurant dinner by the sea. - An airport arrival, where the picture is taken in a bright hall with mixed lighting and the bouquet has to hold its colour against a busy background rather than a plain wall. Delivery along the west coast takes 90 to 180 minutes, with separate windows for villas, marinas and airport routes, and we work 9 AM to 10 PM. Orders start at 2200 THB, and payment goes by bank card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PromptPay, bank transfer or cash in baht. Weather changes the answer more than most people expect. Monsoon showers from May to October give several overcast days in a row, and under that flat grey light a deep bouquet photographs darker still. In those weeks we suggest moving a step lighter, and asking for the wrapping to be light rather than grey or black, since dark paper looks striking in a studio and does the flowers no favours anywhere else. Thai orchids are the strongest material we have in this range and they hold detail on a screen better than most, since the petal has markings the sensor can grip. Imported roses give the lilac and mauve part rather than the deep end. Hydrangeas carry volume, and tropical foliage behind the heads gives the camera an edge to find. > "If the photograph matters, take it by the window before dinner. Everything after that is a picture of the lighting." > JFLOO florist None of this argues against the colour. Purple bouquets in Phuket look better in the room than they do on a screen, and the one standing on the table is the better of the two. Tell us where it will be seen and we will build for that room rather than for the camera.