Most people I photograph have two eyes the same color, and an iris that mostly agrees with itself. Every so often someone sits down in the chair whose eyes did not settle on one answer. At normal distance it reads as a quirk. At portrait size it is the most striking thing I shoot.
The eye at the top of this post is my own. The amber across the top is not part of the edit. It is a wedge of one color set into an eye that is otherwise pale blue and grey, and it has been there my whole life. The water around it is one of our edits, Aquatic Splash. The two colors inside the eye are mine.
Heterochromia comes in three forms. Complete: one eye a different color from the other, blue on one side, brown on the other. Sectoral: one section of a single iris in a completely different tone from the rest, like a wedge of another eye set into this one. Central: a ring of one color tight around the pupil, and a different color from there to the edge.
The short science is pigment placement. Where melanin lands evenly, an eye reads as one color. Where it lands unevenly, in one eye, one sector, or one ring, the eye carries two. That is all most people need to know. The rest is what it looks like.
What it looks like, up close, is a border. In a sectoral iris the line between the two colors is sharp, fibers of one tone stopping where the other begins. In a central iris the inner ring glows against the outer field every time the light hits it, gold around the pupil inside a blue or green eye. And a complete pair, photographed one eye at a time and placed side by side, looks less like a portrait of a person and more like two different landscapes that happen to belong to the same face.
Here is the part people with these eyes tell me: they have known about the difference their whole lives, and they have almost never seen it. A mirror is too far away and a phone photo is too small and too flat. The first time they see their own sector or their own ring on my screen, at the size it will hang on a wall, is usually the first time they have seen what everyone else notices about them.
If your eyes could not pick one color, they are not a flaw in the pattern. They are the pattern. Come see them at the size they deserve.
A session is $60 for one iris, $100 for two. Nothing is collected when you book, and finished digital images arrive within 48 hours.
Book your iris portrait session online or call (910) 218-8045.