Cactus Night Flowers

This cactus is in my yard in Las Vegas. It grows tall and slender, and these flower buds appear. They stay closed but open a few hours after sunset and close a few hours after sunrise, doing this just once. Some nights 1 opens and some nights there can be a few. If you don't see them the first night you won't see them. There is no second chance.

This year, I decided to document it with my camera. I set a custom white balance, used a low ISO of 100, and placed the camera on a tripod with a timer. In some photos, I used focus stacking.

I also used an iPhone 16 with Adobe's Project Indigo app and edited the photos on my phone using the Apple Photos app.

Here are some of my favorites along with the AI Grok provided details from my X account.

Grok says

The post features a striking low-light photograph of a night-blooming cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus) cactus flower in Las Vegas, capturing its brief nocturnal bloom that lasts only one night and attracts moth pollinators under moonlight.

(for some) Rick Stuart, a former Bay Area radio DJ now based in Vegas, used Adobe's free Indigo iPhone app in night mode to capture the image by merging up to 32 underexposed frames, reducing shadow noise via computational photography while preserving natural textures.

Post-editing in Apple's Photos app involved subtle adjustments like darkening shadows and sharpening, enhancing the photo's dynamic range; Adobe's research shows this multi-frame technique improves low-light signal-to-noise ratio by roughly the square root of frames merged.

more of my favorite photos at my Flickr album Cactus Flowers 2025