Night Blooming Cereus

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MrFotoFool

MrFotoFool

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As the name implies, this cactus only blooms at night - AND only one night per year! The largest captive collection of this species is at a privately run public garden in my city of Tucson known as Tohono Chul Park. I am not a flower photographer, but in 2021 I maintained a membership specifically to photograph these. It was a favor to my brother who was working on a book about nature at night and needed photos. (The book is now published: Nocturnalia, 2023 Heyday Books).

Most of the cereus on their grounds bloom on the same night and (in recent years) they only open to members for bloom night. You stay on an email watch list and the day before they can tell it will happen and send out an email saying they are opening for bloom night. Thankfully it was on my day off work so I had time to get ready. The top photo is the one that was used in the book and the rest are others I took. In every case (I think) I combined multiple images (using a tripod) since I was hand-lighting them with a small flashlight and had to pick different parts of different images to get even illumination. These were all with Nikon D850 and Nikkor 24-70 f2.8E .

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