{ Previously Featured Print }

Iris #1

There is a garden not too far from where I live that once was part of a large estate. After the death of the original owners it was left to the city and is now a park, with much of the original layout and plantings. It's a great place to photograph a wide variety of plants and flowers. Many of the prints in the Nature section were photographed there.

While exploring the gardens one day I came across this iris and it really struck me how strong the lines of the leaves were. Many people have expressed interest in why I chose to photograph flowers and plants in black and white when the color is what attracts most people. With this subject I felt that the strong lines would be emphasised more if I abstracted the subject with a very close crop and through the use of black and white film. Color, in this case, would have distracted from the aspects that I wanted to emphasise, and I think a color version of this same photograph would be a very different print. This is still one of my favorites of all of the plants that I have photographed.

- Randy