More bearded irises? Yes, I decided to do another posting on the colorful bearded irises in the garden of my neighbor and photography mentor Cindy Dyer. We are probably near the peak period right now and there is a wide variety of irises in bloom. There is only a stem or two of some of the irises that I photographed, each with several blooms, but there is also one patch, shown in the final photo, where there are at least several dozen irises of the same type concentrated in one area.
One of the challenges of photographing these irises is that the background tends to get very cluttered. I have tried to blur the background by choosing my angle of view and camera settings, and the results are ok.
Cindy has come up with a more elegant solution—she photographs them in situ against a black velvet-like background, which requires the assistance of another person to hold the background in place. Usually her husband Michael is drafted, but yesterday in the late afternoon I was an emergency fill-in when the late day light spontaneously prompted her to photograph the irises that were blooming outside of her yard around an electrical junction box. The final photo is one that Cindy took with her iPhone of me in “action.”
What kind of results do you get with this process? Check out Cindy’s blog postings Bearded iris blooming in my garden and Bearded iris (taken last year) to see some samples of the stunning studio-like portraits of these flowers that Cindy has taken.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Mike I love starting my day enjoying your spectacular photos! Thanks for sharing them with us.
These are lovely photos of beautiful flowers. Kudos to Cindy for growing these beauties (I’ll check her photos later). Kudos to you both on your photography.
I love irises! I have a bunch in my yard. My favorites are yellow and peach.😀
Wonderful bearded irises, Mike, I just love the form and all those colors. Cindy’s images of them on black are quite elegant.
They are a lovely sight. Easily as captivating as dragonflies and butterflies. Thanks
Thanks. I agree–beauty can be found in a wide variety of things in nature and I will photograph almost anything that catches my eye.
These are gorgeous iris photos! A year back as part of coping with pandemic I joined the Iris Society specifically to gain access to their daily iris digital jigsaw. It’s my unwind assistant each evening. Your photos are superior to many offered in the jigsaws!
As are Cindy’s – I’m taking note of her black background-blocker – maybe such would enable me to photograph my red yucca buds – incredibly difficult for mysterious (to me) reasons – the bud so tiny, it gets blurred into background interference no matter how I focus the camera, no matter my angle. (Once the plant is fully blooming, I get good shots.)
Looking at all these leaves me wishing for a dragonfly-on-iris image! We get dragonflies at our pond, and we have iris growing in that pond, but the dragonflies show up after the iris have ceased blooming.
Thanks, Jazz. You can use any kind of material for a background–last year we used white as well as black (https://michaelqpowell.com/2020/05/07/studio-like-irises/), using a white foamcore piece for the white and one covered with a black, velvet-like material. A dragonfly on an iris would be cool. It is hard for me to get a dragonfly to perch on a flower–the closest I have come has been on a water lily bud (https://michaelqpowell.com/2018/08/20/dragonfly-and-water-lilies/) and on a lotus bud (https://michaelqpowell.com/2013/07/13/dragonfly-and-lotus-bud/).
What a lovely assortment.
Thanks, Susan.
The black background might be a good idea but it’s less natural. Your pictures are OK for me. I always take my pictures in a natural environment.
I too like to take my photos with a more natural background. On rare occasions I may try to diffuse the light or add a little bit of flash, but generally my images are a pretty accurate reflection of that I was actually seeing when I took the shot.
Love the subtle shades in some varieties of iris. Messy backgrounds do detract.
Backgrounds are always an issue for photographers, no matter the subject. In a lot of cases, it depends what the photographer’s goal is. For scientific purposes, for example, a white background may be desirable so you can see clearly all of the details, but from an artistic perspective, that might look too stark, clinical, and unnatural.
My favourite is the pic with lots of iris flowers in it. The purple parts almost look like they’re neon-lit on the edges. Cheerful!
Thanks, Liz. Cindy recently posted on Facebook that she had counted the number of blooms of that variety and there were 108 of them. Wow! Of course, most of the flowers had multiple blooms, but that is still a lot of color concentrated in a small garden area.
108 blooms! That’s blooming lovely 😀
What a great selection of images, Mike. Interesting process too with the black screen in the field!
Last year we experimented with both a black background and a white background. Cindy likes the black background better, I believe, but I often prefer the white background, which can make some flower images look like botanical prints.
[…] Powell has done several iris posts, I’ve selected these:Raindrops on irises and Colorful Irises ~North […]
Very nice Mike! Great series of images! You could also try shooting with your lens wide open and focus stack a series of images of just the flower. Usually gives a nice soft background. I also use this on Dragonflies and birds lately. Also depends on the focal length of the lens. The longer the better!
I remember some of your dragonfly focus stacks. I took most of my iris shots with a 60mm macro lens, which is probably a bit short for photo stacking.