I decided to go back to something I photographed years ago: milkweed pods. 'Tis the season, so I went out and collected a few. Here are two of the new ones.
Technical details: I shot these with my new R6 Mark II, using its focus bracketing feature. One of the options is to shoot a bunch of raw photos and leave them without a composite, which is what I did. This is not only easier; it allowed me not to move while photos were being taken, which in turn lessened movement of the filaments. It also made critical focusing irrelevant: I focused manually a bit in front of the closest point, set the camera to do a lot of photos to make sure I had the entire range I needed, and threw out the out of focus ones, front and back, in a few seconds in Lightroom. Lighting was simple: two halogens in hair lights, one with a silver umbrella and the other direct but with heavy diffusion. Both were stacked in Zerene using DMap and processed almost entirely in Photoshop.
One technique I used on one of them is something I posted here recently. On the shorter one, I had not turned down the direct light enough, and there were some hot spots that weren't clipped but were bad enough that they would have started turning gray if I burned enough. So instead, I made a duplicate layer, set it to multiply, attached a black mask, and painted on where it needed burning.
I used three techniques to bring out detail: a bit of texture in Lightroom before going to Photoshop, local contrast via USM in Photoshop, and sharpening with a high pass filter set to a fairly large radius (4+).
Comments welcome, of course. These were fairy quick edits, so I'm sure there is much that could be improved.