One of the debates in photography is whether photographs are true. Maybe I’ll ramble about that sometime. In the pre-AI days, and in the pre-Photoshop days, many of them were still lies, even completely unedited. We pick not only what you see and what you don’t but also how you see it.

No one who gets this close to an iris sees anything like this, and that’s one of the nice things about cameras: You dial in some settings and turn a pleasant but unremarkable iris into a swirl of color and shape and form. I took a bunch of these photos from ever so slightly different angles and distances, and this one made me happiest.

June 8, 2013. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Nikon 105mm macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/8, 1/1,000, ISO 400.