I was surprised to find this remnant late in the season, and couldn’t resist shooting it. It was pale yellow with a green BG and B/W seemed more appropriate.
Is this a composite: Yes
Canon 5D4, 100-400 at 176, f/5, 1/250, ISO 500, focus stack in X+Zerene Stacker.
Diane, this looks great in b&w, with the thorns looking extremely large, sharp and dangerous. I also like how the shape, with only two petals is reminiscent of some orchid blooms. The shift from sharp to soft at the top of the stem strikes me as a too fast, you might have gone to say f/12 for the last image in the stack to make that transition gentler.
What a nice B&W image, Diane. I love the angle the stem is going across the image, and the placement of the bloom. Those thorns do look sharp and dangerous, as @Mark_Seaver mentioned. I haven’t got into stacking yet, so can’t comment on that, but I love the tones, shapes and textures for a very nice B&W image.
Diane: Well seen, composed, captured, converted and presented. A very effective image. Most excellent.>=))>
Thanks everyone! You caught me not going far enough with the focus steps. I took the easy way out and darkened that last in-focus thorn and blurred it a little with the blur tool. It didn’t go quite far enough but I’ll quit there for now and repost. I went back to the single frame that had that thorn the right degree of OOF but I needed to re-size to make up for focus breathing and didn’t have the patience. Or I could have done a little more softening of the focus for the thorn with a Gaussian blur, but would have needed to do some careful blending of the selection edge and that didn’t happen either. Just darkening the thorn with lower contrast solved a lot of the issue.
Excellent composition, Diane, and very appropriate for this challenge. A beautiful image.
