Before planted, I pruned this Ranunculus blossom, placed it in a thin vase, and surrounded the vase with black velvet. I used a special low tripod so I could get right in front of the flower with my macro lens; the image you see is the result of combining eight exposures.

This is another Lensbaby fisheye. I put the camera on tripod up very close to the magnolia tree and used the f/22 aperture ring. I intentionally overexposed to create a high-key effect.

In post-processing I used FocalPoint from onOne Software, a Photoshop plugin, to give the image a sense of focus in the middle and to help blur the edges. Then I partially desaturated the image using the High Structure filter in Nik Silver Efex Pro. My goal was to get the image looking almost like old-fashioned needlepoint.

This is a close-up fisheye of my Leucospermum Scarlet Ribbons. I photographed the flower with the Lensbaby Composer and the new Fisheye Optic.

The image you see is a hand-HDR composite of five exposures, all at ISO 100 on tripod. Each exposure used the f/22 aperture ring. Exposure time ranged from 1/4 of a second to 1/30 of second.

Bondage, as practiced in the plant kingdom, can be an involuntary affair. A Passiflora vine makes beautiful flowers, but it is surely an agressor without conscience. Left to its own devices, spring-boarding with coiled energy, it will tie and knot to everything and anything, killing neighbors. The only way to get this territorial imperialist to let go is to cut it free.

View this image larger.

View this image larger.

All shots with 200mm macro lens, 36mm extension tube, tripod mounted.

In David Lynch’s wonderfully creepy classic film Blue Velvet you know you’ve entered an alternative and not altogether wholesame nether world when severed body parts start appearing at macro level in the grass.

In the Blue Velvet spirit, I am offering a prize to the first person to correctly identify the disembodied (so to speak) body part in this “wholesome” photo of water drops on two blades of grass. Please specify the body part, where in the photo it is to be found, and provide a theory as to whom it belongs. You can enter your guess or opinion as a comment on this blog story, or send me an email. I will be the sole judge as to accuracy and general craziness of any such submission.

The prize is a free copy of my new book Creative Black & White, shipped when it is available.

I forgot to blog this pink rose from about a month ago; better late than never. Particularly when I am coming in on the end of a major project with deadlines—as I am now—sometimes things get away from me.

Here’s the first Pink Rose. Enjoy!

Solarization in photography reverses blacks and whites. Also called the Sabattier effect, in the chemical darkroom solarization was achieved by exposing an already exposed negative or print to light before development was finalized.

In the Photoshop darkroom, there are of course a number of ways to achieve a simulated solarization effect; the solarized (and converted to monochrome) version of Hellebore Curves is one example.

Flowers are beautiful—although why they seem so beautiful to us humans is an interesting question. But when I photograph flowers close-up, like this tiny Hellebore, I am not looking to document that beauty. Instead, I am trying to create an interesting abstract composition that uses shapes, lines and (yes) curves to evoke the ideal flower while maintaining a sense of mystery and novelty.

100mm macro, 1.6 seconds and f/22 at ISO 100, tripod mounted, photographed in the calm natural light of morning with the Hellebore part of a medley in a shallow pan of water.

Phyllis arranged the hellebore medley I photographed earlier into a regular pattern, with the results you see.

The Lenten Rose is a variety of hellebore, Helleborus Orientalis. It turns out that some of the Lenten Rose genome is present in most modern hellebore hybrids, so I’ve taken the slight liberty of naming this photo after both Lent and the pattern in the image, even though strictly speaking there are no Helleborus Orientalis in this photo.

Like Flower Medley, I photographed these Hellebores looking straight down. The Hellebore blossoms from my garden were floating in a pan of water. The pan was lined with black vinyl.

Exposure data: 100m macro, 1/10 of a second at f/16 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.