Pieris japonica flower

[rjlittlefield]

The Pieris japonica bush outside my mom's house is blooming. The outsides of the flowers are kind of bland, but here's what I found on the inside.





I always want to rotate these pictures so the pistils are pointing up, the way the flower anatomy books always show them. But dang it, this is the way they grow -- pointed straight down!

The full flower is 9 mm high.

Aside from the interesting structure of the flower, this subject is another good test for stacking software. Most of the detail is low contrast and easily falls victim to "stacking mush". (I was not pleased with first look in HF and CZM.) TuFuse handled it just fine, though. It did slightly accentuate the brightness of the white pollen, but I'll take that (for now) as a slight price to pay for getting all the rest of the detail.

--Rik

Technical: Canon 300D camera, Olympus 80 mm f/4 bellows lens at f/5.6, 43 frames focus stepped at 0.005", aligned with CombineZM and stacked with TuFuse. The full flower is 9 mm high.

[augusthouse]

[Ken Ramos]

Amazing what we can find sometimes when we pull the covers back.

[rjlittlefield]

Forgot to mention -- I did clean up the background on this one, to get rid of some mild broad halo around the flower. Magic wand in Photoshop to select the background, inverted to select the flower, feathered the selection to soften the edges, and turned the selection into a mask that exposes a new gradient background constructed from colors picked from the original images.

Also, I posted out the source images that went into this stack here. Anybody who wants to download those for research purposes, have at 'em.

Ken, I'm often surprised by what I find inside flowers. In this case, I have no idea what is the function of those long skinny tails on the anthers. On the other hand, this structure doesn't seem nearly as strange as the Vinca minor flower that I did last spring!

--Rik