11 Nov 2025 Photography Blooms

Tall Bearded Iris Ziggy and Van Work

When I posted the blooms from our Tall Bearded Iris Immortality a few weeks ago I thought.

Tall Bearded Iris Ziggy (view full res)

When I posted the blooms from our Tall Bearded Iris Immortality a few weeks ago I thought that was going to be the very last bloom of the summer-fall season, until a few days ago. We had a super surprise bloom of our Tall Bearded Iris called Ziggy, and it went bonkers. The temps in the garden were almost 80°F on Sunday, and now, Tuesday morning we have 23°F which has effectively killed off any and all possible blooms that may come out.

The extreme change in temperature was from some polar vortex or something coming down from Canada (you can have it back now), so this is our first real cold snap of the fall-winter. You can see from the photo below how much green we still had in the Iris Garden before this freeze showed up. Now, not so much.

Iris Garden Before Our First Freeze (view full res)

All these Iris bulbs we will eventually put on our Iris Garden Shop (DIG), this one being the Tall Bearded Iris variety called Ziggy. Below are some of the product photography I was able to get before the freeze took over. Next spring hopefully I can capture multiple bulbs blooming at the same time but you never know, so I always try to get some decent photos as soon as the blooms arrive. The ones below were all taken with my macro photography setup, basically my Nikon D850 and 105mm macro lens and all the images were single photos, not focus stacked as the wind was too strong for that on this day. I also didn't use a flash, but I did have some small reflectors out there aimed at the blooms.

Tall Bearded Iris Ziggy

Van Work Update

In case you are new to my site, we have three other sites, including Deborah's blog, where we post new content. This site mainly focuses on personal posts like my photo albums, photography, faith, and life in general, but we have a site dedicated to our van travels called Shanty Travelers, and our Iris Garden called DIG.

We have been working furiously on the van build recently because we are trying to take a trip to Florida this winter. We were also fighting the weather to get some of these things done inside the van before the weather turned cold, and it looks like we made it by a few days. So there are all kinds of new posts over there like...

Or, the post from our last trip to Pensacola when we got to eat dinner down by the ICW Weekend Drive to Pensacola and Gulf Shores. All of our travel related posts that use to be here on this site are all over there to keep some a little separation of subjects for Google and you the reader. Are you in the northern hemisphere facing winter? What are your ways of dealing with the cold? Here we just go farther south and wait for cold snaps to be over and the 70° returns!