From “Iris, Indispensable and Irresistible” in The New Perennials Preferred by Helen Van Pelt Wilson:
“The iris or fleur-de-lis, Ruskin’s flower of chivalry, ‘with a sword for its leaf and a lily for its heart,’ is a cherished perennial. Alone in spacious hobby gardens it makes a magnificent spring and early summer picture with long drifts of translucent white passing into cream and yellow and pink, lavender, purple and red terminating in masses of seashell and sunset blends….
“The most important iris is, of course, the bearded type, the earliest of which blooms for me about mid-May. In this group, do consider the intermediates which I find so attractive to flank the taller kinds in the border. Of sturdy constitution, they grow from sixteen to twenty-eight inches tall and are, indeed, intermediate in size of flower and height….
“The taller bearded iris have in recent years undergone a transformation which makes the varieties of today a far and joyful cry from the muddy purples and blurred yellows of the plants we knew in childhood as ‘flags.’ Selecting a limited group, however, is a complicated business, for varieties now number in the thousands with a flowering period from mid-May well into June, and heights varying from thirty to fifty inches.
“If you have a rather small layout but wish to feature iris, arrange it so as to simulate depth. I once saw in an almost square plot, with a paved circular center, iris set in skillful gradations in deep triangular corner beds to give perspective. The whites and yellows were planted in the foreground. These have, of course, the strongest visual value. The blues and pinks were behind them with the deeper violets… giving an effect of distance in the background….
“Another good way to lay out an iris garden, large or small, is with elliptical beds with broad paths of grass bisecting an oblong surrounded by some evergreen hedge, or better still a low stone wall made broad enough to sit on….
“When you want to work out pleasing groupings with a bicolor or blended iris, do the way you do when selecting a blouse for a tweed-mixture suit, where you want contrast and not a match. If the tweed is violet with a blue thread, you pick out a blue blouse of the same shade, but if there is a pale yellow line through the tweed, you wear a cream or pale yellow blouse or sweater. In each case you emphasize the secondary tone.”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of multicolor irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of spring this year. There are several varieties of bearded irises represented here — most likely variants of Iris pallida or Iris x germanica — but they’re distinguished from other irises by the overlapping distribution of color combinations in their flower petals. In iris color terminology, they would all be classified as blends (defined as the “combination of two or more colors blended together, whether smoothly or unevenly”) — a useful way of singling them out from their relatives, regardless of their species or variant names.
I took all of the photos on one of those breezy late spring days — the days you relish because you know summer’s oppressive humidity is not too far away. The morning started out mostly cloudy, but the wind was strong enough to push clouds around all during my photo shoot, sometimes changing the lighting entirely between the time I framed a composition and the time I pressed the camera’s shutter button. In similar conditions, I’ll often just wait for the clouds to return and cover the sun, but lights on/lights off happened so frequently I just decided to lean in and go with the flow (double-cliché alert!). Throughout the entire series, I ended up with four identifiable lighting scenarios, represented by these four photos.
The first photo (top left) shows a pair of blended irises in full sun, where the sun is above and behind me, so light is distributed evenly across the entire image. To the extent there are shadows among the leaves or petals, they’re produced by the leaves being turned away from the angle of the sun or where one part of the plant casts shade over another. Lighting like this can expose fine details when the photos are well-focused, though there is some loss of gradient color — the alternating colors appear to begin and end at precise boundaries instead of gradually blending — simply because the sun overpowers less saturated colors. At the same time, shadows can be intrusive or distracting (though can be balanced better through editing), and the background — which has nearly identical brightness to the foreground — is less separated in terms of light and color, so the image tends to appear somewhat flat overall.
The second photo (top right) shows similar lighting for the foreground and subject of the photo, but in this case the light is coming mostly from the left. Because the plant was growing at the edge of a group of tall shrubs, this side-lighting renders the background heavily shadowed. This lighting — which looks a lot like studio spot lighting — produces color and detail similar to that of the flower in the first photo, but provides subject/background separation since the background is naturally darker. This separation — in terms of color, brightness, and focus — also means that the background can be altered to introduce a greater sense of three-dimensionality and implied depth by further blurring and darkening it in Lightroom. The background leaves were actually just a few inches behind the blooming flower; but I edited them to give the impression they were farther away.
With the third photo (bottom left), we begin to see how diffused lighting — when the sun goes behind clouds — can introduce effects that better show off the color characteristics of these irises. Because there’s no strong or harsh lighting, the subtle color variations threaded through each flower petal become more evident, and there are no shadows cast across the petals or leaves. The lighting on the main subject is diffused enough to render fine color variations in the petals, yet strong enough to introduce the kind of glow generated by scattered lighting coming simultaneously from the side and back of a translucent subject. The dark stone wall behind the subject creates some contrast to help show off the flower colors; and the additional light caught by the desiccated flowers at the top of the wall makes each spent bud gleam a bit, like strings of Christmas lights seen from a distance.
The final image (bottom right) demonstrates a common challenge with photo shoots on full sun days when the subject of a photo is partially or fully shaded and the background catches all the light. Here we have a version of that fourth photo before I’ve wrapped up editing. The flower — the subject of the photo — is largely swallowed by the bright background; indeed, it’s possible that your first glance at this photo would barely register that the flower was there. In real life, your eyes and brain compensate for these odd lighting conditions naturally — balancing them out — and you wouldn’t necessarily notice the flower was in the shade. But a camera simply records what was there, rendering the scene as a dark foreground and excessively bright background.
To improve this photo, we want to swap the lighting conditions between the background and foreground. Because the flower and its leaves are sharply focused and the background isn’t, Lightroom can readily distinguish between the subject and background so they can be adjusted independently to reverse the brightness relationship. We can get an image that closes the gap between how our human visual system interprets a scene like this and how a camera captures it — a technique that isn’t complicated and is available in any photo editing app that provides the ability to selectively edit subjects and backgrounds.
Here are the two variations of this photo side-by-side; select either one to compare them in a slideshow. Note the incidental improvements in color in the final version: colors become more intense and saturated because they’re darkened in the background, but lifted out of shadows in the foreground…
… revealing just how many colors are present in a blended-pattern iris like this. And these irises certainly pass the “tweed suit test” described in the last paragraph of The New Perennials Preferred by Helen Van Pelt Wilson at the top of this post: the colors in the flowers complement each other with contrasting patterns, and, for these irises in particular, the flowers mirror the colors and patterns of stone structures in their surroundings.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
