ready to launch

A pair of spacemen wearing yellow pants and white helmets 😉
Slipper Orchids, these are quite amazing flowers, the level of detail and texture in them astounds me.

Nicely done mother nature could not have done it better myself. Its always a challenge to capture the full depth of field when macro'ing, focus stacking is one technique, but time consuming and often (for me) does not give the desired results, in this case I use a couple of images manually blended to achieve my depth of field and also maintain some nice smooth, soft background. The other challenge posed by these flowers is the red tone, very hard to replicate and convey in a image such that it looks like what it does in real life. The red is a real deep dark red encased in areas of soft pink and spotty white. The yellow bits are .. well bloody bright yellow, i guess to attract the pollinators 🙂

2 frames Blended
Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with Nikkor 55mm f2.8 @55mm Aperture: f/13 and Shutter Speed: 1/3s
ISO 100
out front – Slipper Orchid

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed