Alstroemerian Abstraction

Tonight's blip is really an exercise in abstraction as I set myself the challenge of capturing an alstroemeria bloom with bitingly sharp focus throughout. I was using my 100mm macro lens with a 21 extension tube as that gave me a bloom which was pretty well full frame. I was using a f32 stop but that was nowhere near covering the required depth of field so I had to focus stack my image. Normally I would do this by going from the nearest focus point to the furthest but sometimes in doing this you do not allow for absolutely every area of the image so on this occasion I set my camera up on a tripod and used the live view magnification to manually focus on different bits of the bloom such as the end of petals and the stamens. Even though this must have been awkward for Photoshop to stack, align the images and auto blend.The important thing was that it in fact worked.

I made life doubly difficult for myself by not removing the bloom from the vase of flowers that it was already in. This meant I had to somehow select the edges of the bloom very carefully in order to set the flower against a neutral but complimentary background. Whilst I added a drop shadow  I don't think this worked particularly well.