Weed of the Week - Birds foot trefoil

I haven’t totally forgotten about my W.O.W project, but I haven’t shot anything new for it until yesterday. My driveway is gravel and so there are thousands of weeds in the parts that don’t get driven over regularly. These are blooming now and so I got out after the rain to see what I could do with my new Platypod eXtreme and the LED panel.

These are in the pea family and have the Latin name Lotus corniculatus. Each cluster is made up of several smaller blossoms and this one is 2 cm wide. Like a lot of weeds and wildflowers, this was introduced to North America by Europeans and basically this one is considered naturalized in many places, but is really an invasive that should be controlled. The plant is a messy little thing that sprawls mostly along the ground and can grow between 6 inches to 2 feet high depending on conditions.

I shot this with the camera on the Platypod which is flat on the ground, and the LED light just behind and to the side of the flowers. I used Focus Bracketing in two sessions to get 42 photos to stack. By starting in two different places and using the 0/-/+ method, I got most of the cluster in focus except for some of the leading edges of the closest flowers. The wind picked up too much to continue, but I might give it a go later today since it’s still wet out there and relatively still.

Specific Feedback Requested

Do the OOF areas bug you?

Technical Details

Platypod & Lume Cube LED Panel (off camera)

image

Lr for RAW processing - it needed a little exposure and the blacks pulled down quite a bit. Tone management for the rest, some sharpening & texture. A little NR but no saturation or vibrance. Sent 42 shots to Zerene directly and this is a PMax final image with retouching to smooth the background a bit and to get rid of some halos that a PMax stack seems to always produce. That TIF came back into Lr for some additional work to get the blacks and exposure down a bit.

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Wow, this is simply excellent, Kris. So you blended two separate Focus Stacks? Never thought to do that. Almost like blending a pano?

What rich color, and the yellow/green contrast marries well. I really like the water drops; they add a lot.

The loss of focus moving back through the image doesn’t give me any issues, but I do wish the closer parts of the flowers were in focus. It’s a personal quirk, but for some reason closer parts of the flower out of focus seems less artistic than bokeh loss of focus as the image slides into the distance.

Thanks @David_Bostock & @John_Williams - I guess I wasn’t all that clear. I did two bracketing sessions with different initial focus points chosen. Each was for 21 images. I think a breeze came through between as well, but not enough to move the cluster for the second set. Both sets of 21 images were used.

Although I have blended the results of two stacking sessions together before. When there’s too much variation in the groups of images to do it directly I will stack two sets of say 10 or 20, produce two TIFs and then put those into Zerene to stack. I find it has an easier time aligning when there are fewer images to do it with. So sometimes for really big stacks (50+ images) breaking them into smaller stack jobs can work.

Oh and yeah…the leading edges bug me a little, too, but not so much that I scrapped the whole stack project. I will do better next time!

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