Orchids: My Best Bloomed and Photographed Large Flowered White Phals., 4 by atisch

atisch wrote:
Large white Phals strike me as one of the most beautiful and overlooked of all commonly-grown orchids. Mine here, like many Phals are inexpensive and probably meristem cloned plants for the flower market. It was purchased years ago with no tag or "papers". All we can probably say for certain is that there is likely a lot of--if not entirely Phal. amabilis--in it's background.

Typical of an on and off again orchid grower, I typically keep growing the plants on in the hopes of some day blooming in out sometime nearly as well as they were when purchased. It sometimes does. And when it does it gives me the opportunity to work on improving my photography techniques. in this rare case i was able to accomplish both goals, so I thought I'd share the results.

AS I've been struggling with bad lower back pain, my main goal last summer was to just find a way to just keep the plants alive during the summer. THe best I could so there was to just place my Phals among my ferns on the north side of the house which is covered by automatic sprinklers. However, I did forget the slugs an snails which played havoc with the plants, making something akin to Swiss Cheese of the heavy leaves. Any pictures taken of winter blooms would have to be heavily blacked-out. As you can see they are--but that goes to technique.

To isolate the flowers only, I basically just used a zooming LED flashlight, which works very well for producing a very dark background for otherwise almost all white flowers. the first 2 are intended for computer wallpaper and the last 2 are cropped with the intention of being used as wallpaper for Galaxy (or iPhone) wallpaper. Anyone who would like these as computer or smart-phone wallpaper may contact me by d-mail for non copyrighted photos. I've also had very good results with the LED spotlighted photos for highly colored flowers as well. Hope you enjoy these.