Totally Flourescent! Echinopsis Sorceress Blooming on the Back Deck

Echinopsis Sorceress. This is appropriately named and totally bewitching! This little cacti has been growing under a teak coffee table on the back deck and is blooming for the very first time for me. This has been a banner year for Echinopsis flowers. Some of my Echinopsis have been in bloom for several months in a row. It is totally amazing with some producing set after set of flowers! As for Echinopsis Sorceress, I had no idea Echinopsis could be so brilliant (although rumor has it I saw a picture before I bought it)!

Photo trick: I started off taking the picture against the deck, fussing with depth of field to blur it out. The deck lines were too distracting, no matter how shallow the depth of field (and it was a deep flower so you couldn't go too shallow or you would lose all the "interesting stuff"). Then I tried taking it against the white canvas cloth of the patio furniture. Too bright... Ahah! The light bulb goes off... I realized that it was still a little dark out (about 6am) and thought that, maybe, just maybe, if I put it on the deck railing and shot down against the canyon (which is quite far away), I could get a dark background. Voila! It is simply amazing what lengths I will go through to avoid taking out the black velvet! This cute little trick works whenever the background is a lot darker than the subject which, in this case was lit with a flash.