A dandelion inspired by Robin

[DanK]

Inspired by Robin's excellent image of a dandelion seed head, I just tried the one I had been thinking of yesterday, using a different lighting setup than Robin used. I blended 18 images using Zerene PMax. I shot them with a single reflective umbrella for lighting, aiming for a very diffuse light, so the exposures were long: 1.3 sec at f/7.1.

Here's my postmortem, but others might see them differently. While I prefer the more diffuse lighting, it has a very clear cost: even standing stock still, it was impossible to avoid some movement of the filaments with an exposure as long as the one I used. If you blow the images up in the lightbox, I think you will see that the filaments are cleaner in Robin's. The strobe stopped the movement. I haven't done any flowers with strobes, but I think this might push me to try.

As I could see mine at a more enlarged level, I could see stacking halos along the stalks of the seeds, which is a consequence of parallax when stacking something very deep. Now that I have seen it in mine, I think I see it in Robin's too, but I can't enlarge it enough to compare. Different stacking methods suffer varying amounts from this, but it isn't entirely avoidable with images where the distance between an edge and whatever is behind it is large.

C&C welcome, of course.

[bnnrcn]

Hi Dan. I didn't know that it was possible to create such different compositions of a dandelion. Yours is another different and nice one

[Wavelength]

Beautiful indeed

[Black Pearl]

A spot on image and some excellent background/technical details to go with it.

[IzzieK]

This is very nice, Dan but I also like Robin's version very much because his center is very round like a green golf ball.

[Dave A]

Looks like tiny corn cobs. Nice image.

Dave

[Ziggy]

That's nice, well done.

[rudi]

As you said in your 'postmortem' , stacking could be easier/cleaner, but nevertheless a good shot Dan! I use continuous light (some fancy Ikea Jansjo's ) for focusing and flashes for shooting.