Silene dioica seeds

Elivood · Post by **Elivood** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 1:18 pm

Today I finally had time and inspiration to go photographing. (Been busy with work and new school I'm attending this fall (got to med school! yay!!)).
All photos are uncropped and in "studio" photos I glued the seed on a toothpick hold it steady.

A shot outside and once I noticed the structure of the seeds I wanted to do a series of photos on a different magnifications.
Sony A77, Sigma 50mm macro with 36mm extension, 1/250 f/11 ISO 100

Silene dioica by Rasmus Rissanen, on Flickr

50mm macro with 68mm extension, so this should be around 2.36x magnification. Stack of 8 photos.

Silene dioica seed at 2,36x by Rasmus Rissanen, on Flickr

Next is my new 4x microscope lens I bought few months back but this was the first time using it. I talked about it
here. I have to say results are great for the price! Stack of 13 photos

Silene dioica at 4x by Rasmus Rissanen, on Flickr

And finally 9x magnification with 9x Lomo microscope lens. I still have to work on with lighting the subject and I'm not entirely sure why center of the photo has so low contrast. But still it reveals the surface structure nicely. Stack of 33 photos.

Silene dioica at 9x by Rasmus Rissanen, on Flickr

Carmen · Post by **Carmen** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 2:31 pm

thank you for sharing Elivood. Curious plants: in finland, correct? The 4X foto looks great!

I wish you success at Med. School!

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 2:46 pm

Congratulations on med school acceptance!

Regarding the last picture, the problem looks like flare, probably caused by reflection from the inside of your extension tubes or some adapter. Possibly also from an inside surface of the objective, but usually this center-only flare is from something farther back. To debug the problem, set up the shot but remove the camera, place your eye where the camera would sit, and look around the sides for stray light. Ideally everything would be black except for the lens of the objective. When you find the troublesome reflection, either flock or mask it.

--Rik

Elivood · Post by **Elivood** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 3:00 pm

Thanks guys!

Yes, it's a finnish plant called puna-ailakki. It's rather common flower here. It has beautiful violet flowers and it's also known as samettikukka (velvet flower) since it's covered with soft hairs.

Thanks for the advice Rik! I haven't started looking for the cause of the problem with the last picture. I was thinking it might be caused by the lense since I use the same setup with the 4x lense, only the lens is different. And I bought that 9x lomo used for just a few euros. I have to admit bellows had few holes in it when I bought it used so it's also likely that I just have missed some when I fixed it.