Trillium

Large Flowered Trillium, April 19, 2005
There are lots of trillium species and they all share similar characteristics. Above a whorl of three leaves, is a flower with three petals. Some trillium flowers are white, some are pink, and some are maroon. All of them are somewhat rare and serve as indictors of a healthy forest understory.
This large flowered trillim is known for its, well, LARGE FLOWERS! It's Latin name is Trillium Grandiflorum. Sometimes the Latin names are fun to say and easy to remember. I found this trillium near the Appalachian Trail in southern Virginia, but I have seen this species in Michigan and also Iowa. The flower starts off as a white-pink color that continues to get darker and darker pink as the flower ages. As you can guess, this flower is just a couple days old.
I often find pollinators visiting trillium flowers, but it's hard to get a good photograph due to the dark conditions on the forest floor, which requires a somewhat slow shutter speed. Usually insects appear blurred. Perhaps next year I will try to capture images of insects using fill flash. But up to this point, I have stuck mostly with insect-free plants on a calm and overcast day.
This photo was taken on a day when there were scattered clouds in the sky. I got a few shots with full sun and several more with partial or complete shade. This image shows a little bit of the overexposure that can be caused when sunlight sneaks into a photo. If you look just under the flower petals where the leaves come together at the stem, you can see what I mean. Some photographers would call this a "hot spot" because the sun burned through or overexposed the "film" (but in the case of digital photography, I should say "sensor"). I am sure that I could have darkened that distractingly bright area of the image using some trick or tool in Photoshop, and someday I might even try. But for now, I just wanted to post the photograph without worrying about such small details. Besides, I don't know enough about Photoshop yet to do it. And I was eager to start posting images again on this website because posting images is lots of fun.