All around the hills in the Algarve the Barbary Nut Iris has started to flower. I’m certainly no flower expert but it’s a great sight to see the purple flowers covering the landscape.
The odd thing about the Barbary Nut Iris is that the flower has a very short life, just half a day! It opens around Noon, closes at dusk and doesn’t open again. So it’s crucial the Bees do their job of pollination.
I set the camera up and focused on one flower, I used the 500mm lens and f/4 to create a very small depth of field and waited and waited and waited…….. The Bees were landing on all the other flowers except this one, typical. Then after about 30 minutes one finally came along and even stayed in the very small focus plane.
UPDATE (3rd April 2018): As this photo shows, the Iris flowers have not opened today. You can see some new ones that are yet to open though. This is the same flowers I photographed yesterday.
