Falling in Love on White, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is the Papaver rhoeas ‘Falling in Love’ that I photographed on a black background. The version here gives me the advantage of a “twofer”: I created the white-background version of the photo in Photoshop by inverting the Luminosity channel (in LAB color mode), then copying the orginal flower back on top of itself, and masking out the black. A few tweaks followed, but that is the general idea, and it is pretty simple to do. Which version do you like better?

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), three exposures with at 1/2 of a second, one second, and 2 1/2 seconds, all exposures at f/36, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Falling in Love, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a photo of a Papaver rhoeas ‘Falling in Love,’ a double variety of Papaver rhoeas I got from Annie’s Annuals.

I cut a flower off the profusion of these poppies in our garden, and photographed this flower indoors. I put the flower in a glass flute to keep it upright, and placed the flute on a black velvet background. The background rested on a board and rod placed between two chairs. I positioned the flower so sunlight was striking it from behind and to one side. Then I used a large piece of soft gauze to soften the sunlight.

In Photoshop, I combined three exposures at times from 1/2 a second to 2.5 seconds to capture the full dynmaic range of the light falling on the delicate pink petals.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), three exposures one at 1/2 of a second, one second, and 2 1/2 seconds, all exposures at f/36, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related story: Here are some shots of the Dawn Chorus variety of Papaver rhoeas.

Red Flowering Dogwood, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Phyllis and I celebrated our wedding anniversary last week. Sixteen years, three kids and one more on the way, it all seems like forever and no time at all. I’m so lucky to have a real life partner.

My parents sent flowers as did Phyllis’s mom. This red flowering dogwood blossom is from a branch in one of these bouquets.

I photographed the blossom in the morning like of our breakfast nook using a macro lens and extension tube setup. The water drops are judiciously applied, and come from my professional high output sprayer.

This final version combines different exposures and three different stacked focus points, for an image that is (depending upon the definition of the term) HDR as well as High Focal Range (HFR).

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, three exposures with different focal points, exposure times ranging between 1/6 of a second and 4/5 of a second, all exposures at f/40, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Daffodil, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

If you’ve ever looked closely at a daffodil like this beautiful specimen, you’ll know that within the outer yellow petals is an orange “trumpet”. The trumpet itself contains the reproductive parts of the flower: ovaries, pistil, and the stigma, style, and anthers shown in this photo. You’ll know, from having observed the daffodil, that these reproductive parts are really, really tiny.

So tiny that when I photographed this flower indoors (to control wind) backlit with the bright light of the morning sun in our breakfast nook, I found I could not get both the style (which sticks out a bit) and the anthers (the things covered with pollen) in focus.

The solution is to extend the field of focus by taking multiple photographs, each with a different point of focus. Provided you use the same aperture in each exposure, it can be possible to combine the two images as layers in Photoshop, thus extending the field of focus. In this case, I took two captures, one focused on the style and one focused on the anthers.

This process is sometimes called focus “stacking”. But I figure, why not give it a high-fallutin descriptive term and acronym? Extending the dynamic, or exposure, range of an photo using multiple captures creates a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. So why shouldn’t extending a photo’s focal range by stacking several captures create a High Focal Range (HFR) image? You heard it here first…

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, +4 diopter close up filter, two exposures with different focal points, both at 1.6 seconds and f/36, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Clivia, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Clivia, a lily-like flower originally from southern Africa, grow on the shaded side of our house with very little intervention from me. These are slow growers, but spectacular, and unstoppable once established. I love them, but they’re tough to photograph in the deep shade, with their tendency to move in the slightest wind.

So the obvious move was to cut a nice stem of clivia, put it in a vase, and photograph indoors.

The clivia is shown here stopped down to f/32 for a high depth-of-field image. I put the stem in the vase on a black background using sun light for illumination. Like the anemone I photographed the other day, the final image represents several initial exposures at different shutter speeds (see the technical data below).

So, I assembled the flowers on the clivia stem from two exposures, one lighter and one darker. Looking at the results, I saw I needed more construction. I was looking at a horizontal, and the image needed to be vertical. This switch was a matter of cropping in on the flower, extending the canvas downward using a black background color, and adding a layer to extend a cloned version of the stem.

[Nikon D300, Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms), 1/5 of a second and 4/5 of a second at f32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related images: Asiatic Lily Bouquet, Sunflower.