A real treat

Two nights ago I was invited for a rare (only every 20 years) blooming event of a Night-blooming Cereus that belongs to a friend of mine, Linda Metzner.

  She told me it would be after dark.

 But I ended up being on the phone till 9:30 and then was about to go to bed, when I thought, what was I going to do this evening?  OK, better go see that flower of Linda's!

So off I go. There are no selfies in this post!

 Was I ever glad to join some friends and see the 4 different blooms over the next hour, in their glory as they opened fully.

  By the next day they all were closed.

We were a camera crazy bunch that evening!

My first picture with natural lighting...

This lone bloom was hanging off the porch over the railing, out in the wilds...

These three beauties opened before our eyes, getting wider and wider as we watched.  The closed one on the left had opened the night before, and didn't reopen.  This is indeed a once every 20 years bloom occasion!

Because it was night, we were trying every kind of setting with and without flash on different cameras.  We found a really neat technique of using the flashlight setting on one smart phone to illuminate, while another phone could take pictures.

The colors changed from natural lighting to the illuminated photos, or the ones with flash.

Besides my smart phone (used above) I had my trusty Nikon Coolpix L810.  I tried macros, but couldn't get them to work, night portraits, night landscapes, flowers, scenes, etc.  All the strange titled setting combos, and must have finally come up with something that satisfied.  The following are with different settings, and I think I deleted most of the out of focus ones.

What a wonderful experience!  Hail to the Cereus!