Saturday, November 20, 2010

Balloon Flower Stigma... floating above rain water... Summer, 2010

balloon flower stigma
This is for Ginnie... along with a bit of a story. Earlier this month, I posted an image that shows an entire Balloon Flower blossom. And Ginnie left a comment about knowing who to come to if she needed help learning how to use her macro lens... so this is for her.

When the flowers turn their faces up, their "bells" catch water when it rains. I snapped this image after heavy overnight rains using extension tubes along with my macro lens. I think I used the 36mm Kenko extension tube with my Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 lens on a Nikon D90 body for this shot. ((I really MUST start taking notes... the other possibility would have been with the 12mm AND 20mm Kenko extension tubes together instead of the 36mm tube.) Using extension tubes allows for really tight focus on a very little bit of the field of view... leaving the rest as a dreamy wash of color. The stigma is about 1 cm (3/8 inch) in diameter.

Oh... before I forget... Ginnie is someone I'm getting to know through her marvelous blog... you should check it out!

4 comments:

  1. beautiful!!!!
    I like the elegance of the flower

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  2. Well, you've totally surprised me, Victoria, because I didn't expect my name here. However, THANK YOU. And thank you for your tricks of the trade. I do have extension tubes, along with a good macro lens, so now all I need to do is get to work and start experimenting. THANK YOU!

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  3. The water make it look as if the stigma is made of blue glass. Very pretty!

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