800 Photos in Two Hours: What a Brace, a Phone, and a Field of Irises Taught Me About Slowing Down

I went to Schreiner's Iris Gardens in Salem, Oregon, intending to take "a few good reference shots." Two hours later, my phone held over 800 new photos, my brace was making its presence known, and I hadn't sat down once. I don't regret a single photo.

Ruining Your Sense of Time

Schreiner's has been growing irises in the Willamette Valley since 1925, and it shows in all the work — ten acres of layered color. Ruffled purples beside butter-yellow standards. Peonies leaning in for attention. Blossoms can be so demanding, almost like a toddler. Columbine, quieter, curtsying at the edges. This is not a garden for speed visit.

A blossom from four inches away is something closer to a conversation.

I'd like to say I drifted through with serene composure. The truth is gentler than that, and a little funnier: I'd kneel for one iris — place the shot, stabilize the phone, a deliberate process these days — get the shot, and then notice another one a few steps away, and start the whole quiet negotiation again. My brace and I have come to an arrangement. It holds the structure. I supply the enthusiasm and poppers, sticks and tripods. Stabilizing with only one hand to macro shoot is… challenging, at best.

Why Macro

People sometimes ask why I work so closely to my subject. Here's what I've come to understand: a bloom from across the garden is pretty. A blossom from four inches away is something closer to a conversation — between light and dark, sun and shadow, between where one petal ends and the next begins, between the color you think you're seeing and the others quietly residing inside it. That's the territory I was made for. Impressionism doesn't ask what a flower looks like. It asks what it feels like, in the minute when the morning light lands just right and you forget everything, except the beauty in front of you.

That is where I am. It's what I hope to give back to you, when one of these paintings ends up on your wall — an invitation to stop for a moment. And just breathe.

On Taking 800 Photos of the Same Flower

I'm not going to apologize for the number. Every blossom is kind of the same flower, and yet never the same twice — different shades, different light, different angle, a different way of holding itself. Of the 800 frames, perhaps forty will become paintings. The rest aren't waste; they're the looking that happens before seeing occurs. They are drafts and revisions.

We See. We Breathe. We Enjoy.

If you've ever been told you notice too much, feel too much, care too much about the small things: I'd offer this garden, and the 800 photographs, as a quiet rebuttal. We See. We Breathe. We Enjoy.

A Word on the Brace

I'm still finding my way with my new physical reality, Braces. Gardens, it turns out, are an unexpectedly forgiving place to do that. Gardens don't keep time the way the rest of the world does. They only ask that you be there. That's a small grace I needed and one I suspect many of you, busy and accomplished and quietly tired, could use as well. I am getting a new brace that will allow access to my fingers. Small graces, small joys. We all need them.

Small graces, small joys. We all need them.

What's Coming

These photographs are the beginning of a new body of work, and I'm looking forward to showing you which irises earned their place in it. If you'd like to follow along as the paintings take shape — early sketches, color studies, the occasional standoff with a stubborn petal — join my Collectors Circle. That's where I share scenes from my studio and early access to original paintings. 

Until then: find something extravagantly colorful and get closer to it than feels reasonable. Your body may object. But the joy is so worth it.

 — Cynthia