Night Blooming WTF?

The place where I work has this unusual flowering plant, where a few solitary flower stems grow at the edge of the plant leaves and the buds themselves develop over about week’s time. Then, all at once and for one night only, they blossom, magnificently so.

This image licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported License.

EXIF:
Camera: Olympus SP560UZ
Exposure: 0.033 sec (1/30)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 4.7 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: On, Fired

I have no idea what this flower is. The central part of the flower is probably about 20 centimeters across. Just amazing to see. If you have an idea what this flower is, please share!

Photographically speaking, I was seriously concerned about overexposing this shot (and the 25 others I took), but I knew there was no way I could photograph these flowers in total darkness, especially handheld. I lowered the intensity of the internal flash to -2, the lowest setting, and set the ISO to 100ASA. After downloading them to my computer it turned out, thankfully, that the shots were underexposed and needed some PSE Level help to pull them up from the dark.  With only a single night to shoot, I was glad.

Update: Thanks to the wonders of Related Links, I found this site, and now know that this is a Night Blooming Cereus (OK-2 out of 3 isn’t too bad. :) )

More photos? Of course!

Night

Blooming

Cereus

Close the door behind you

The last full moon of 2008.

This image licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported License.

This is one of those rare photos where I had the time to play with the settings on the new camera to see what results they’d produce and discovered the real limitations of all the bells and whistles. Even with the 18x optical zoom, not one single Mode or Special Setting allowed me to capture the details of the moon as clearly as going to complete manual setting. The EXIF is below.

And why, you ask, are you seeing this image twice? To illustrate again the importance of resizing your image to the maximum width for your theme before uploading and inserting in your WordPress.COM post, if you care about image clarity. The top image was resized in PSE5 to 720 x 540 pixels and then uploaded. The bottom image was uploaded at full size (1632px × 1224px) and the 720 x 540 pixel image you are seeing in this post was resized by WordPress. Notice the difference?

EXIF:
Camera: Olympus SP560UZ
Exposure: 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 84.2 mm
ISO Speed: 50
Exposure Bias: 0/10 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire