Cubs Win It and More Iris Blooms

How is Spring going where you are this year? Down south it's almost over, but not quite yet. We started out in a severe drought and finally started to get some rain the last week or two, and with it, flowers... everywhere. This is perhaps the farthest behind I have ever found myself in editing our Spring blooms, but maybe that's because we have more flowers to shoot than we ever have before. Our next hybrid Iris bulbs to bloom are called Cubs Win It, and they went all out with around 20-30 blooms in the one garden bed.

I'm making an attempt this year to better document the process of shooting, so with all of the Iris blooms I am using my older, big, heavy camera, a D850 and a macro lens. That means my other cameras are being used in the documenting process. The Iris flowers are large enough that they don't really need a macro lens, it just happens to be one of my sharpest lenses, and the combination gives the truest rendition of the colors and textures.

With the Iris bulbs the edit I'm doing is very minimal. The goal here is to represent these blooms as close to real life in color and contrast as possible. We will eventually be using these images as stock photos for our Iris website (DIG) so we need them to be as true to how we see them in real life as I can make them. I do love the pastels in the yellow iris bud below, it just has that painting look to it, but it is a very unique yellow.

There are a lot of "NoID" blooms in our yard this year, which means they either have "No-ID" yet or they are just unidentified for good (generic). The purple below is an example of a more generic Iris bloom in our garden, the same with the pure white Iris blooms below.

I find the pure white flowers the most difficult to photograph since the white tends to blow out and you lose all texture and depth. This is a lot like trying to shoot snow when it all just turns into a white blob, so underexposing the whites is the best way to go.

This is an example of a Violet NoID Iris bloom, for the moment, since we will be able to identify this one eventually. We had one bed that had one named sign but two completely different blooms came up, so we will have to go back and verify records to give this one a proper hybrid name. It's such a beautiful violet purple and in the shade it just turns almost luminescent.

Cubs Win It Hybrid Iris

The hybrid Iris bulbs are the heart of our new Iris garden and these were some of the first ones to show up this Spring. These are called Cubs Win It which have this very light blue-purple upper flower (called their Standards), yellow beards, and deep dark blue-purple lower flowers (call their Falls).

Their blues look purple in some light and blues in other light. You can tell below how flowers look vastly different depending on how the sun is hitting them. Shooting flowers in the shade or reflected sun is almost always my aim to reduce the glare and properly show the colors.

This is just a very small taste of what's to come from our Iris Garden . If you haven't seen the earlier Spring posts you can check out First Set of Iris Blooms to Share or when we first got started this Spring with Bright Spring Colors Are Here when we got out the fertilizer and got to work.

If you have any garden photos to share just reply to our email or leave a comment in the post below. Until next time...