It was July and we were photographing the early morning light at North Lake above Bishop, California.  Someone mentioned to us there was a field of wild irises up by the campground so we had to check it out.  Sure enough.  We found a meadow sprinkled with wild irises, their purple providing rich accents to the lush green.

The meadow was surrounded by a fence, no doubt erected by the wranglers from the pack station back by the lake.  I'm not sure if they put the fence there so they could use the meadow for grazing or to keep their pack animals out, probably the former.  The fence was suitably rustic made from pine bows and barbed wire.  It conjured thoughts about the impact that man has on our natural environment. 

I try to avoid man-made objects in my photographs and if this had been a metal fence post instead of a pine bough I would not have taken the photograph.  But I think we have a nostalgic connection with 'old' man-made objects like run down barns or wooden fence posts.

The shooting conditions were a bit unpleasant.  Being July, the mosquitoes were in full force and I was cursing myself for leaving the insect repellant back in the motel room. This was a photographic workshop and I had warned the attendees about this  very situation and here I was, ignoring my own advice.  And the mosquitoes seemed to be especially drawn to my breath.  So I had my sweatshirt still on from sunrise, my wind breaker on, the hoods drawn up over my head, my  gloves on and the temperature was already climbing into the 70s.  I got some rally funny stares when a pack train passed by.

Compositionally, I was looking for threes.  All the books I've read on composition and all the photographers I study with say that it's better to photograph odd numbers of objects.  I never understood why and when asked for an explanation, never received a satisfactory one.  But I decided to 'follow the crowd' and look for compositions with three irises.  This composition really has four flowers but one is tucked away in the shadows.  It's definitely not very prominent.  So I guess I got away with creating a composition of three from four.

The fence post begged to be placed in the center of the image, a placement that tends to make the image static and a bit lifeless.  But the strand of barbed wire comes through the frame on the top third and is a bit tilted.  It is very important as it breathes energy back into the photograph.  It has symbolic value in that it contrasts the gentleness of nature with the sharp reality of human presence.

I had to lay down on my belly to get this shot.  I suspect that's pretty obvious when you look at it.  Sometimes you need to change your viewpoint to get the best shot and it's a good practice to experiment with different viewpoints.  We are so accustomed to seeing the world from our normal viewing height that we forget there are other points of view, like perhaps those of the ground squirrels and other critters that inhabit the meadow.  Also, I had to get down on my belly to shoot the scene straight on.  Other the stems of the flowers wouldn't have been straight up and down.  They would have diverged and looked unnatural.

I shot this image with my Canon 1Ds Mark III with the 24-105 lens.  That's my 'walk about' lens, the lens I use when I'm going to be shooting hand-held.  I use that lens because it's image stabilized so I can get away with a little camera shake.  Still, I was able to make a human tripod out of my two elbows and my chest.  And I was shooting pretty much wide open to give a narrow depth of field so the shutter speed was high enough for hand held,  So there aren't any problems with image sharpness except for a little softening toward the top but that's a lens thing.

The post processing was pretty standard - set a black point, adjust the overall luminance, make the contrast pleasing.  The purple irises wanted to stand out and that was pretty easy to obtain.  I did play around with the greens for a couple of days through, going back and forth between a more subdued green and a brighter one.  I settled on the latter.  The final touch was to add some vignetting around the four corners.  In situations like this it is very effective in pulling the eye toward the subject.