Grocery Rose

I picked up a bunch of roses at a grocery store a couple of days ago to give too my wife (and photograph).  I wanted to get one floating in water with a reflection image.  This turns out to be easier said than done.  I started with a 9x13 glass baking pan sitting on a black cloth with a black bg behind it.  It turned out that I not only got reflection from the water, but from the glass bottom.  I cut a piece of black construction paper and convinced it to lie on the bottom by thoroughly soaking it.  Then I had to put a small rock in to rest the rose against so it wouldn't drift around.  As it turns out, 11 inches of length was just barely enough with a little cloning top and bottom to eliminate extraneous elements of the pan.  I also had to add a touch of canvas to the top in processing to balance the composition.

Photographically, this was a six image stack done in Zerene Stacker which handled it without any hitches and literally not cleanup of stacking artifacts.  There was a lot of post processing with the colors to get the rose back to some semblance of the real thing because the camera decided it should be much paler than it really was.  I think the result is fairly close.

5DIII, Ef180 f3.5L Macro, tripod and cable release, all images at f/16, 1 sec, iso 100, manual exposure.  Processed in Zerene Stacker with post in LR5 & CS6.  Some cleanup of imperfections in the petals (not the best quality flowers).  Taken this afternoon with indirect lighting through a skylight.

Comments and criticisms are most appreciated.

Thanks,