White Orchids

Flower fine art photography of white blooming Orchids over black. The graceful and elegant Orchid flower epitomizes love, luxury, strength, and... more

by Juergen Roth

Title

White Orchids

Artist

Juergen Roth

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Flower fine art photography of white blooming Orchids over black. The graceful and elegant Orchid flower epitomizes love, luxury, strength, and beauty.

The other day I got my hands on white orchids. It was a great find and allowed me to add an additional images to my existing Orchid Flower Fine Art Photography Gallery collection. Our dining room window faces east and provides exceptional morning light bouncing off my neighbors' walls into our dining room. As a base for the flower I use a chair and books that I place in front of the window. Because I prefer working with natural light I use white card boards to direct light towards the floral when it is facing away from the window. Adjusting the white boards to explore the impact on the lighting and better control the light on the flower is a great learning experience. It is a very delicate process and one has to watch carefully to notice the adjustment for maximum impact. Sometimes I am still caught by surprise on its affect and how it positively enhances the quality of a picture. In the final floral close up photograph of this pink orchid I positioned the flower in the best possible way that allowed the right amount of back-lighting leading to a more pleasing floral image. I chose a small aperture setting (large f-stop number) of f/32 that provided sufficient Depth of Field and an exposure time of 8 seconds. During post processing steps I removed dust spots, minimally adjusted lighting, contrast and color saturation before sharpening the final macro photography image of the pink orchid "XXX".
The Orchidaceae are a diverse and widespread family of flowering plants with colorful and fragrant blooms, commonly known as the orchid family. Along with the Asteraceae, they are one of the two largest families of flowering plants, with between 21,950 and 26,049 currently accepted species, found in 880 genera. Selecting which of the two families is larger is still under debate, as concrete numbers on such enormous families is constantly in flux. Regardless, the number of orchid species equals more than twice the number of bird species, and about four times the number of mammal species. The family also encompasses about 11% of all seed plants. The largest genera are Bulbophyllum (2,000 species), Epidendrum (1,500 species), Dendrobium (1,400 species) and Pleurothallis (1,000 species).
The family also includes Vanilla (the genus of the vanilla plant), Orchis (type genus), and many commonly cultivated plants such as Phalaenopsis and Cattleya. Moreover, since the introduction of tropical species in the 19th century, horticulturists have produced more than 100,000 hybrids and cultivars.

Uploaded

December 22nd, 2013