"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: irises

A Profusion of Irises: White Blooms on Black Backgrounds

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From “The Onset of Spring” by Elizabeth Lawrence in The Writer in the Garden, edited by Jane Garmey:

“When the daffodils are waning and the tulips coloring, dogwood and pearl bush, flowering almond, snowflakes, and the early white iris are at their best, and trees and trellises are dripping with purple wisteria. Then spring is in full flower with tulips, lilacs, and flowering crab-apples, followed closely by peony, iris, and mock orange.”

From The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Stephen Buchmann:

“Color is one of the main signaling strategies flowers use to beckon their pollinators. Floral colors also serve as filters, selectively attracting specialist pollinators to certain blooms while eliminating others. For many of those pollinators, the brighter the better, which must be why floral colors, especially those created by the petals, are among the most highly saturated colors found in nature. Technically speaking, saturation is the strength of any given color in relationship to its own brightness. The purest, most highly saturated colors are of one or a few close wavelengths and contain almost no white light (the combination of all wavelengths), while unsaturated colors appear faded or washed-out because white light has diluted the colors. Saturated colors can be equated with their perceived intensity.”

Hello! Below are a few photos of white irises I found while iris-hunting at Oakland Cemetery a couple of weeks ago. Click here or page down to view the galleries.

As I’ve written here before, I use both Lightroom and the Nik Collection for developing my images. My general workflow includes culling RAW images in Lightroom to eliminate those I don’t plan to process, then working through Lightroom panels to adjust sharpness and noise, optimize exposure, remove spots, and improve overall color saturation and luminance. For black-background photos, I use Lightroom graduated filters, radial filters, or brushes to “erase” everything around the subject by reducing exposure, whites, and shadows to remove all the color.

Once I’m satisfied with the appearance of a photo in Lightroom, I edit the image in several Nik Collection tools, using Color Efex Pro to further enhance contrast, color, and detail. The Nik Collection tools don’t update RAW files directly, so on first launch they create a copy of the original RAW file (which is added back into Lightroom). I have a recipe (or preset) in Color Efex Pro for seven filters I use most often:

  • White Neutralizer, which brightens and removes any color cast from whites.
  • Brilliance/Warmth, which enhances individual colors and has a setting called “perceptual saturation” that adds a touch of depth to the image.
  • Tonal Contrast, which affects the color and contrast of image detail in such a way that I often use it to soften backgrounds and make them appear more out-of-focus than they were in the original RAW file.
  • Pro Contrast, which also enhances contrast, but in a way that increases the texture of key details in the image.
  • Darken/Lighten Center, to brighten areas I want to draw your eye to, and darken others (especially color-filled background elements).
  • Reflector Efex, which simulates the effect of directional light from a flash or reflector on selected parts of the image, that I usually use to brighten shadowed areas.
  • Levels & Curves, which provides tone-curve adjustments (similar to those in Lightroom) that I use specifically to remove excess cool-blue color cast that my camera tends to produce.

I seldom use all seven of these; it just depends on the image and what I decide I like while making adjustments with each filter. There is also some overlap between results you can achieve with the Nik Collection and those you can achieve with Lightroom; but the two tools use different techniques for enhancing photos, and (for my purposes) the Nik Collection targets colors in subtle and effective ways that can be very tedious to accomplish in Lightroom. For the photos in the galleries on this post (and for several dozen other iris photos I’ve updated with black backgrounds), I tried to render whites that were nice and crisp, and create color variations that contrasted well with other parts of the photo, and so that you’re eye would register fine lines and details in the shapes of the flowers.

Park all that for a moment.

When I finish post-processing and exporting the photos from Lightroom, I use an app called FileBrowser on my iPad to review every one. I got into that habit a couple of years ago, after discovering that I could find flaws in a photo that I still needed to correct, typically spots that I didn’t notice on my computer monitor or color variations that didn’t look quite right. These perception differences occur because mobile devices use different color spaces and screen resolutions than monitors do, and, of course, it’s easier to inspect an entire photo on a small screen held closer to your eyes than it is on a monitor. With black-backround photos, tiny areas around the edges of the subject or elsewhere in the frame that I missed while brushing in the darkness are much easier to see on the iPad, but I also noticed some artifacts appearing when I created pure black backgrounds that surprised me.

Here’s a screenshot from my iPad showing one of the photos from the galleries below. If you look at the bottom of the image and move your eye up, you’ll see that the black of the iPad screen and the black background of the image are different, and there are slightly off-black horizontal pixels running from the bottom toward the middle of the photo and, less obvious, a halo around the flower itself.

At first I thought it was just my eyes reacting to the contrast between the white flower and black background, or the iPad’s overall brightness, or the room lighting, or maybe a ghost in the machine. I had completed about fifty black-background photos of Oakland irises for this ongoing project, though, and found the off-black shading on all of them — with the intensity (especially of the halo effect around the flowers) varying quite a bit, but very evident on many of the photos. And, you know, some things you see you just can’t unsee … so I decided to try and figure out why this shading was occurring.

Here’s the RAW image in Lightroom after I completed exposure and color adjustments and darkened the background, with the exposure cranked way up so I could determine if the ghosting was occurring in Lightroom. As you can see, the background is pure black, showing no artifacts.

Here’s the same image, after passing it into the Nik Collection’s Color Efex Pro and returning it to Lightroom, also with exposure cranked up. Here you can see the artifacts clearly: the shift to light gray running from the bottom of the photo to the middle, and the concentric halos around the flower.

So now I knew that Color Efex Pro was creating the ghosting effect; but since I had applied as many as seven of the filters to each photo, I didn’t know which one was responsible. To figure that out, I started over with a couple of the photos, passing each one through Color Efex Pro, applying only one filter on each pass, then checking the results in Lightroom — and determined that the horizontal shading running from the bottom up was from the Reflector Efex filter, and the concentric halos came from White Neutralizer.

I interpret this — possibly inaccurately — to mean that these two filters are altering the red, blue, and green pixels (especially evident on the halos) to create their effects, gradually decreasing in intensity as they transition away from the targeted part of the photo. If the background wasn’t black — meaning, if it still contained colorful elements in shades of red, blue, and green — then the filters would simply alter the intensity of those colors and not show any sad effects. Having learned what causes this ghosting, I need to avoid using these two filters on my black-background images… which also means I need to re-process about 40 photos — argh! — so am headed back into my “darkroom”. See you in a couple of days! 🙂

Select the first image from each set to see larger versions; and try “View full size” if you would like to get a closer look at the color and detail.

The previous posts in this series are:

A Profusion of Irises: Black (Iris) Friday!

A Profusion of Irises: Iris No. 1

Thanks for reading and taking a look! 🙂

A Profusion of Irises: Black (Iris) Friday!

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Hello! Below are a few photos of black irises I found near the entrance to Oakland Cemetery while on my recent photo-trips. As you can see from the photos, even though it’s a called a “black iris” there are threads of purple, magenta, and dark blue running through all the petals. In brighter spots — as shown in the first two photos — yellow sunlight emphasizes the intensity of the purple and magenta shades; whereas those more shielded from the sun — where the light shifts to cooler colors — show blue highlights instead.

Select the first image to see a larger version; and try “View full size” if you would like to get a closer look at the color and detail.

The previous post in this series is:

A Profusion of Irises: Iris No. 1

Thanks for taking a look! 🙂

A Profusion of Irises: Iris No. 1

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Haiku by Matsuo Basho in The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Stephen Buchmann:

Come on let us see
all the real flowers of this
sorrowful world.

After the dream
how real
this iris!

I’ve made enough progress with post-processing iris photos I took at Oakland Cemetery in April that I decided I would start posting some of them. Well, in this case, one of them. This beauty produced a huge blossom, about six inches across at its widest points; and if you stare at it long enough, you may feel like it’s in motion, the petals waving at you in a spring breeze. The colors — blends of dominant purple shaded with blue — are the most common iris colors, and this flower’s large size shows them off well.

Select the image to see a larger version; and try “View full size” if you would like to get a closer look at the color and detail.

Because many of the iris blooms were so large, I used narrow apertures (f/14 or higher) to get as much of the bloom (from front to back) in focus as possible. Doing so brings in a lot more background elements at the same time, of course, so as I’ve been working through the photos, I’ve made decisions about whether to keep the background as shot (which works well for an isolated bloom or a bloom and its leaves), blur it (which you will see in some future posts), or remove it entirely. The iris shapes and colors fare really well against total black, so I picked out about half of the 120 photos for background removal — despite how long it takes to “unmask” the twists and turns of the flower petals and get the final result right.

Below are side-by-side variations showing the original image of the iris, followed by the black-background version. I used Lightroom’s spot removal tool to repair some defects in the petals, though happily didn’t have to spend too much time deleting offending pollen bloblets from the flower. I also made exposure and color adjustments in Lightroom — and applied some contrast and detail filters in the Nik Collection — to lighten excess blue shades (partly a darkening or saturating effect from using narrower apertures) and add a bit of additional texture. To remove the background, I dragged a Graduated Filter across the entire image; set Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks as shown below; then used the Erase brush to reveal the bloom while leaving the background black.

Select the first image if you would like to compare the before and after renderings.

One down, 120 to go! Thanks for reading and taking a look! 🙂

Spring 2020: Isolated White Irises (and Cognitive Overload)

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From Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age by Sven Birkerts:

“Caught up in such a radical overload of competing signals, the self naturally acts to preserve its equilibrium. We have several options. We may try to put curbs on intake, and if we can’t just shut off the flow, we learn to direct our attention selectively; or else we economize by skimming, taking in the highlights of a book, an event, a speech or conversation. Where possible we speed ourselves up or divide our awareness in such a way that we can carry on several activities at once…. But … it’s worth inquiring about the cost, which is surely a loss of focus, attention, immersion, and connectedness….

“This dilution is what inevitably happens when the attention is distributed or fragmented. After all, an experience, an encounter, is only ever as intense, as ‘real,’ as our ability to respond to it — it is always less about the event than about the perception of the event. We are all capable of complete engagement on one end of the spectrum and scattered distractedness on the other. Who of us imagines he is exempt? The greener grass on the other side of the fence has more to do with the desire for greater focus than with the actual color of that other field….“

From Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman:

“We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory. We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort.”

From Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson and Bill McKibben:

“Attention casts the deciding vote in what we perceive of the world and so is the beast to harness in a world of cognitive overload.”

“Isolated White Irises and Cognitive Overload” — how’s that for a blog post title?

Once upon a time, in the years before I decided to retire, I was part of a large project team working to replace a complex set of software systems for a manufacturing business. The project lasted about five years and was sort of my swan song since it took place in the third decade of my information technology career. As the project moved from beginning to end — sucking up exponentially more time, money, people, and brainpower — it turned into the most stressful event of my entire career…. actually, of my entire life. I started trying to manage my stress by walking and walking and walking — and listening to audiobooks about how to manage stress. That’s not really important any more; I only mention it to provide context for the rest of this post.

In about the second year of the project, people began to talk about how the stress was affecting them. I’ll always remember a meeting where one of the team members told us that on the way into the office, she had tried to use a credit card instead of her i.d. badge to access the building then presented her i.d. badge to pay for coffee. We had a good laugh about that — humor is often about juxtaposition — but we were also laughing a little uncomfortably maybe, because each of us was making the same kinds of mistakes, with greater frequency than any of us considered normal.

We were all experiencing a kind of cognitive overload that occurs when trying to deal with constantly competing, conflicting demands and an endless flood of new inputs that we had to think about on a daily — sometimes hourly — basis. This kind of overload — different from information overload, which is benign by comparison — occurs when external events present more than your brain can effectively process and separate into short-term and long-term memory, so short-term memory (which also enables you to complete most tasks) hiccups like a computer that can’t keep up with the demands on it.

Think of it this way: when you visit any city for the first time, you’ll often feel a little disoriented as you take in a large number of new sensory inputs and try to navigate unfamiliar streets. You’ll feel less uncomfortable the second time, more comfortable the third time, and fairly quickly adapt (you are a marvelous adapting organism!) to your newly understood surroundings. Now imagine the same scenario, except that every day that you set out, the streets have been rearranged — and you will gain some insight into what cognitive overload really means.

As a simplistic explanation, your brain seeks its own natural efficiency and keeps you functioning by doing two things: first, it filters out excess information that’s not relevant to what you’re trying to focus on; and, second, it tries to help you “automate” your experiences so that things you’ve already learned — especially tasks you want to execute in a sequence — don’t have to be consciously relearned every time you do them. Driving is a good example: once you’ve learned and had sufficient experience with the step-by-step actions required to crank up the car and propel it toward a destination, you don’t have to consciously walk through those steps every time. You simply act on them, effortlessly and subconsciously. The process steps have essentially become automatic, freeing up your brain (and you!) to think about something else.

So what’s happening, right now?

You don’t need me to point out that you’ve been bombarded over the past few weeks with a huge volume of information. Unlike the excessive political and cultural noise that has increased over the past few years, this information is different: it’s disrupting daily life in ways we don’t even fully understand yet; and it’s about an event that potentially threatens your physical health — and is therefore harder to turn off. Below are a few observations — born of my own five-year war on stress and trying to help others deal with it.

  • We all rely on a variety of information sources, but it’s important to remember that our “information infrastructure” is based on a attention-capturing revenue model, specifically tuned to trap you in a psychological state where you find it difficult to turn away. The model isn’t just embedded in social networking sites; it has permeated most media outlets — regardless of their form — and tries to draw you in by hooking you emotionally with sensationalism, or, right now, with fear. Consider, for example, these two recent headlines from different sources, about the same moment in time (four days ago) and about the same news:

    Coronavirus explodes in Georgia with nearly 150 cases confirmed

    146 cases of coronavirus confirmed in Georgia

    The phrases “coronavirus explodes” and “nearly 150 cases” in the first headline are typical of the millions of bits of clickbait that we’re all inundated with: the headline uses emotionally-charged and ambiguous terms to heighten your anxiety and get you to click. The second one presents the headline as a precise statement of fact and you’ll have a completely different reaction to that: your brain processes it less emotionally and with less anxiety as information instead of grasping first at your fears. If you’re getting information from sites that constantly play on your emotions (those using emotion and ambiguity to get your attention), stop following them or reading them and find better sources (they’re out there). In many cases, these better sources will be more local and useful for you anyway (the second headline was from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), and very deserving of your attention and support.
  • Because your brain is attempting to perceive, process, and integrate so much news and information — and that news and info has such an impact on what you do and how you act — the parts of your brain that help you perform common daily tasks are overloaded by trying to sort it out. You may feel this as a sense of slight confusion or fog, or reduced awareness of your external surroundings. Like the story I told about switching an i.d. badge with a credit card, you might temporarily forget steps in tasks, make mistakes you don’t normally make, or do things out of order. So allow yourself to slow down a bit, make lists or consciously bring steps in a task into focus as you do them, or take a few deep breaths before you drive a car or operate machinery or tools — and you may notice that the fog of cognitive overload at least partially dissipates as you shift your whirling thoughts to the present moment instead.
  • People deal with anxiety and stress in many different ways, of course; but I think that it’s useful to recognize that one driver of increased anxiety is actual — or perceived — loss of control. Most elements of this event have been imposed on you, it’s highly impactful, you can’t avoid it, and its has no contextual precedent in your life experiences. So try to just accept that and influence what you can: your immediate physical surroundings, your relationships and interactions, the thoughts racing around in your head, and the information you consume.

    Activities like reading, writing, listening to music, or creative pursuits (like photography!) help shift your brain onto something other than thoughts about things you can’t control; and activities that also include light, low-risk, repetitive physical activity can be even more effective. That’s why walking in natural surroundings works so well as a stress-reducer: your brain can idle as it effortlessly takes in natural sights punctuated by the rhythmic movement of your legs and the rhythm of your breathing. Of course — in these circumstances — you have an additional risk assessment to keep in mind, so only walk where you have confidence in its safety and the ability to keep your distance, since you can only control your own actions and not the actions of others. If you have a dog, dogs, a cat, or cats, engage in play as much as you can; my little pup has turned out to be a top-notch performer when it comes to helping me reduce my stress levels — and, apparently, he never gets tired of playing ball!
  • You may have experienced some anxiety about buying essential supplies, especially food, and especially after seeing news coverage of quarter-mile long lines at grocery stores and overstuffed carts. A couple of mollifying thoughts, based on what happened in the Atlanta area: (1) over a period of three days last week, families everywhere learned that schools were closing and businesses were sending tens of thousands of people home to work, effective almost immediately and with an unknown end date; (2) many families of course realized that they needed extra food and other supplies, to cover those meals that were provided in schools or by grabbing breakfast or lunch at a nearby restaurant during the workday; (3) the shift home came just before a weekend, when stores are typically busier anyway.

    These factors combined with inadequate government messaging about supply chains to create an unprecedented surge in demand, which settled down in less than a week. The grocery stores near me are still busier than usual and taking extra time to restock, but surge-buying is subsiding. We can all help each other by planning a little ahead for our essential purchases: where you may have been accustomed to dashing to a store to fill gaps in the fridge or pantry, try to plan out meals for as many days as you can, and shop or order from delivery services at regular intervals but no more than necessary. Every human interaction now implies some risk: even if you choose to have supplies delivered, several people must interact to make that happen. We are not, unfortunately, accustomed to thinking about the apparent miracle of food appearing in our grocery stores or packages materializing on our front porches, but this is a good time to consider all the individuals that make that possible.

    Planning ahead can help you manage some of the anxiety; even the mental act of planning helps smooth those ragged thoughts — some of which you might direct toward the millions of people already suffering from food insecurity that will increase in these times. Check organizations like Feeding America or Meals on Wheels for local chapters and donate if you can; these organizations can take even a few dollars and stretch it substantially to help families in need. United Farm Workers of America is an excellent resource for learning more about how those fruits and vegetables actually get from the field to your kitchen. They would like you to know that the people who put food on your table do not get to telecommute — and are among the many heroes who deserve our thanks.
  • Give yourself a break from the bad news by trying to find some of the emerging good news, things that are happening around you that are a testament to human beings and their endless creativity, ingenuity, and spirit. Locally, for example, many restaurants are converting to pickup and delivery to keep some of their staff employed; others are distributing meals to laid-off employees or providing lunches and dinners to first-responders and health-care workers; and a local animal shelter is even trying “drive-up adoptions” so people can continue to foster or adopt animals while minimizing exposure to others.

    For me, being something of a tech/culture/society nerd, I also like to dig into stories about how some of the changes happening right now may point toward permanent shifts in how society is structured. Picture this: over the last week, as much as 30% of the American work force — in both private and government organizations — streamed from their office buildings and skyscrapers to work at home instead of in crowded offices, some initially stumbling perhaps over the difference between face-to-face and remote or video interactions but quickly adapting. Many will return, I’m sure; but others will begin to realize their work is just as satisfying wherever it’s performed, and some organizations will recognize that their physical presence in a concrete and steel structure really isn’t required. Imagine, for example, that in some number of cities in any country, several thousand people no longer have to commute every day, and just one block of skyscrapers gets converted into affordable housing or even green-space. Dreamy, perhaps, but I do believe the seeds of transformational place-related changes — whose potential has been visible for years now — are being planted as this event unfolds.

By Monday, March 15, nearly every public space I like to haunt (like Zoo Atlanta, Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Atlanta History Center) had closed for at least two weeks. I’m not complaining! Parks like Grant Park, Piedmont Park, Oakland Cemetery, and many others remain open, but I’ve decided to stay away for now, instead planning to finish processing a few hundred spring photos I’d already taken at Oakland, and shifting the camera’s focus to the early growth in my own garden. I took and posted a lot of photos from my garden last year — so for me it seems a little like a rerun — but we’ll see what sort of new and creative things I can do with some of the same subjects on a reboot. I probably won’t write 2500-word essays (this was exhausting!) with each batch of photos … or maybe I will! 🙂

For the gallery below, I took the first pair of photos a couple of weeks ago, thinking that the incoming irises would be light blue or purple, based on their tip colors. Turns out — as I discovered on a second trip — they bloomed in pure white, presenting a nice contrast with the background colors, or against a background converted to black as in the last three photos.

Thanks for reading and taking a look! More spring colors soon … be safe!

Clarence, The Bearded Iris

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From Cornell Institute for Climate Smart Solutions:

“Gardeners are keen observers of what is required to grow healthy plants of all types and sizes. New strategies and solutions to the problems presented by cultivating living things are often contemplative acts. These actions will hold gardeners in good stead as we face climate change – an unprecedented phenomenon that amplifies all those conditions that can make or break our gardening success. Deep reflection on our strategies in tending our lawns, trees, shrubs, flowers, and vegetables will be required to manage and adapt to this latest – and biggest – challenge.”

This flower’s proper name is Clarence Bearded Iris; but we’ve known each other a long time, so I just call him Clarence.

I planted a dozen of these irises in my front yard garden about five years ago, and this year they surprised me by barely blooming. It went like this: with very warm temperatures in early January, the iris’s leaves filled out and they shot up a few blooms in a couple of weeks, about three months premature. Then we had a cold snap that lasted about a week, then it rained for days and days and days, then the chilled and soaked blooms dissolved before the photographer got a shot at them, then the plant went dormant.

I’ve noticed that certain flowering plants — lilies and lantana, for example — stick to their approximate spring bloom time regardless of winter weather conditions, whereas others — like irises and hydrangeas — seem more likely to bloom early if winter is warm and the ground never freezes, but then get knocked out if fluctuating temperatures lead to a few days near or below freezing. It’s tempting to think that lilies and lantana are more suited to global warming gardening (pdf) than irises or hydrangeas, but maybe in time the latter will make accommodations.

However!! I was looking through some archived photos the other day and found a couple dozen — including three I had posted previously — that I’d taken of Clarence in April 2016. Some day, I imagine, I’ll stop finding photos I forgot I’d taken … but that day isn’t here yet. A bit of tweaking in Lightroom got me to the proper colors for this beauty… though the original files were .jpgs (I’ve only been shooting RAW for the past year or so), and there were some challenges getting the exposure, highlights, and shadows to my liking.

I’ve been reading about proper iris care, and suspect that these plants are ready to be dug up, divided, and replanted — a task that should be undertaken in late summer or early fall. So that’s on my gardening calendar (well, I don’t really have a gardening calendar, but I’m sure I won’t forget) and maybe next spring there will be a whole new batch of Clarences standing up tall for the camera.

I’d also been looking for some good information about gardens and their history — not the history of specific gardens or of garden design, but histories of the plants we use in our gardens. Whenever I plant something new, or photograph something I’ve planted, or post about it here, I always wonder where that plant came from, how far back in human history it’s been in gardens, how it’s changed over time, and so on. It’s not as easy to sort that out as you might think; though we may try to rely on search engines to splash such details onto our screens, searching for specific plants usually yields more about the plant’s growing characteristics or its relationship to other plants in the same family. And, more often than not, the commercialization of search engines means that research takes a back seat to brand marketing, and many sites simply repeat — with slight variations — the same information available on other sites that want you to be aware of their brands.

But then I found this fine book…

… which provides concise ecological and cultural histories for each of 133 plants and flowers that are commonly used in gardens. I learned, for example, that Clarence is a member of the iris germanica family of bearded irises and his ancestors often grew in monastery gardens in the Middle Ages; that bearded irises were bred systematically in Germany beginning in the 1800s; and that these irises were popularized in America by immigrants of German origin that imported them or brought them across the Atlantic. As an entry typical of all the plants covered in the book, the author devotes four pages to irises generally, their historical usage, cultural significance, and descriptions of variants that are unique to specific geographic regions. So far I’ve found references to about twenty plants currently in my garden, and I can now use this book as the starting point for additional research (and writing).

Click for larger pics; thanks for reading a taking a look!