Iris Panel, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A clump of irises in my garden have the wonderful variegated stems you see in this photo. I wanted to photograph them while they were in their prime, but the background was messy and wouldn’t work. So I threw a large black cloth behind the flowers to use as a backdrop.

I knew when I planned my exposures that I would be underexposing for the background, and then lightening the flowers and foliage. So I started with a substantial under exposure at 1/4 of a second, and layered on top elements from a one second and from a two second exposure.

The original of this image was a vertical shot. As I was processing the image in Photoshop, I was reminded of a Japanese Shoji screen. To emphasize the resemblence to a screen, or panel, I duplicated the image, flipped it horizontally, and added it to the original to create a new horizontal image.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR lens at 36mm (54mm in 35mm terms) with image stabilization turned off, circular polarizer, three exposures between 1/4 of a second and 2 seconds at f/29 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]