Tall Bearded Iris Immortality

We had one more flower blooming hurrah for the end of summer, the all white bloom of the Tall Bearded Iris variety called Immortality. As I mentioned in a previous post when we had a Surprise Late-Blooming Light Purple Iris we could have one more bulb bloom this fall, a pure white bulb, and this was the one. This variety happens to be one of the reblooming varieties, so it can bloom again in late summer or early fall depending on weather and all kinds of other factors. But this one did!

Today for my weekly series I'm including this as my Macro Monday post because these images were taken with my macro lens, and one of the macro shots was close to a 1:1 rendition. I also used a focus stack on two of the shots below. If you want to see how this is done I did a post called How to Use Focus Stacking for Macro Photography which has a great step by step video in the post that I pretty much have to rewatch every time I do a focus stack.

Photographing Pure White

This Tall Bearded Iris is one of the more unique varieties in our Iris Garden because it's white top and identical white falls. Eventually this iris bulb could go on our Iris Garden shop under Immortality Reblooming Bearded Iris, and every time we get a new bloom the photos can add to our catalog on that site. This was the first time we had ever seen Immortality bloom in our garden. The Immortality Iris bulb has an incredible beauty to it when you see it in person, and since it might eventually go on our Iris Shop I always try to take photos of the blooms at every angle and distance with as accurate a color rendition as I can create.

The internet is full of completely inaccurate color renditions of products and in nature, but when color actually matters on an item it's important to capture it in somewhat soft light, no shadows, and with very little editing on the color hues. Accurate true colors on a computer screen are very challenging because it depends on the technology on the receiving end, but you have to make it accurate on the capture side first.

This particular bloom was that much more difficult to photograph accurately because of its all white structure. If you have ever tried to take a photo of a scene that is all snow you know that if the snow is pure white it isn't visible with any kind of detail or texture at all. If you tone it down a bit the snow just gets a muddy color and looses what makes it so pristine, the pure white color.

Details in Macro

One of the things I love about Macro Photography are the details that seem to appear when you look more closely. This flower is an all white bloom, but it has striations of blue in the pedals, browns on some of the back side and on a Tall Bearded Iris, what is called the tongue, is yellow with pin pricks of pollen. The base of the bloom towards the stem is also a white yellow. All very unique to this particular Iris variety, but also very hard to see in a passing glance.

Iris Immortality Photos

As far as we can tell this is going to be it for the Iris bulbs for this year. Next spring we hope to have between 60-65 different color varieties blooming, but these are all new to us since Iris part of this garden was just built this summer. I'm not sure how the fall weather looks where you are but it still feels like full on summer where we are, so we are looking forward to some cooler fall weather.

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