Rose Pogonia is not a very rare plant, like the
Arethusa (<-- click to view) I photographed last week, but it is still one of my favorites.
I shot this one from my lightweight canoe that allows me to get to locations like this fen created by a beaver dam, so I had space to pack more equipment, such as a diffusion disk and bracket to hold it. In the end, however, I liked this sunny shot better than the ones I made with the diffuser.
For this shot, I used a technique from my previous trip -- hand-held stacking. There was no place to set up a tripod because the water is too deep around these floating bog mats, so I shot from my boat. With the boat moving slightly directly toward or away from the subject, I shoot in bursts (6+ frames per second with my camera) to get images to stack. Post production for this one was more complicated, however. Since the background vegetation was so close to the flower, there was not a smooth background. The slightly out-of-focus stems near the flower showed up in different places during the stacking process. To clear that mess up, I selected just the flower from the stack and superimposed it onto a single frame from the stacked images.
Larger image provided
Canon 50D
Sigma 150 mm. Macro
f/11 @ 1/400 sec.: ISO 400
-- 3 images stacked in CS5 for depth-of-field
-- black area of background on right side replaced with vegetation using content-aware fill.
Comments
9 commentsI've been doing stacks using a bean bag for avian images in burst mode but I was only doing it to control the noise so I could crop tighter. This opens up an entirely new way of thinking for me.
pat
I like the flower and I like the slanted reed to the left. If wishes were horses and beggars could ride, I would wish that the stem of the bog orchid was just a touch more in-focus. Going hand-in-glove with that wish is that the BG could be just a touch more out-of-focus. I think if the latter were done, the stem would not be a deterrent.
My 2-cents. In the meanwhile, the flower, per se, is beautiful.
Ciao ;^)
Carol
Congrats on finding this rare beauty, capturing it and PP the flower into a piece of art.
Bob
MARK -- Thanks for pointing out the dark lines on the petal edges. There are actually two kinds of them. Niether of these are artifacts created in the stacking process. First, there are dark red/magenta lines, mostly on the top edges of parts of some petals, and they are there in all the RAW files before processing, so I did not try to get rid of them. I did not notice the black lines below some of the petals until you mentioned them. They are not there in the full-size image, but just appeared when I shrunk and sharpened the file for the web.