Every year, I make photographs of the irises that grow in our front yard. It has always been challenging to make some good images of these flowering plants in the Spring. Let’s start with this image of an iris before the flower opens.
When capturing macro images, close up, only a thin sliver of the flower would be in focus. The image above was made by capturing many frames, each focused on a thin slice of the flower, and stacking these frames into one image; this is known as focus stacking. The final image has far more in-focus detail.
Looking around our iris flower bed, I found another open flower that has a prominent beard and stigma. The beard is always the most difficult to capture. In this image, I like how the yellow/orange tones in the funnel portion (behind the beard) have rendered.
These irises generally produce group that contains three beards. I found another flower where one can see two beards. I also included the bud of another flower as a foreground in this side-on image.
Although the flowers are really beautiful when open, they eventually wither. They are equally magnificent when the petal parts have collapsed and dried out, as can be seen in the image below.
Typically, one iris plant produces one or more stalks. Each stalk often have several flowers that grow at several points along this stalk. In the image below, we see a stalk with two flowers that have opened and withered. In the center is a new bud that is forming at the base of the two earlier flowers.
I found another partially withered iris plant that has some really detailed surface texture.
This final image is one of my favorites from this year. I like the diffused warm tones in the background as the sun dropped in the evening sky.