Walking iris

[leonardturner]

The "walking iris" produces small flowers--the central petals span about 35 mm on my specimen, while the spiky white portion is about 5 mm. Blooms last for only a day. Trichomes are prominent and somewhat visible without magnification.

[ChrisR]

Darn! When I saw "walking iris" I thought of stepping motors on lens diaphragms, something which has been on my mind .

But these are much more attractive images, of a fascinating flower, very nice.

[Lou Jost]

Very nice. Can you give more info on lighting, especially for the last one? How did you get the hairs to have such broad dark outlines in spite of the bright background? This is something I struggle with.

[leonardturner]

Chris, sorry, I had no intent to deceive! But stepping motors on apertures? I'm glad to even be out of the age of presetting f-stops and then having to remember to physically rotate to the preset before shooting!

Lou, lighting for the final image was LED modified by a cylinder of light absorbing paper of a size to slip over the Ikea light on one end and containing coffee filter diffusion materiel on the other, topped off with polarizing film. Optics for the last image consisted of a 10 X Nikon objective mounted on an old Nikon 200 mm lens with a polarizing filter between allowing variable degrees of extinction.

My thanks to you both for your comments.

[peterkinchington]

Hi Leonard,
Lovely series. I still use preset f/stops on some of my cameras!
Cheers Kanga

[Lou Jost]

Thank you very much for that information, Leonard. Lovely light in the whole series.

[leonardturner]

Thank you, Peter and Lou; appreciate your comments.