Carnivorous Plants in Action

In a thread a couple months ago, we talked about how to photograph flowers, when flowers (and, by extension, plants, generally) appear to "do nothing". I thought it would be fun to show some recent photos where the plants are more obviously doing something. Here are some shots of roundleaf sundew, a carnivorous plant, catching and eating insects. I hope you enjoy:


© Mike Spinak


© Mike Spinak


© Mike Spinak

By the way, a few technical details:

These were all taken with a Canon 1Ds Mark II, with a 180 f/3.5 macro lens with a 2x teleconverter, on a tripod, with a remote release. The apertures varied, but they tended to be rather small, like around f/22. The exposures were pretty slow.

These were taken in Butterfly Valley, in California.

I also took exposures with differences in focus, for trying focus stacking, later.

Hi Mike,

Isn't nature fascinating, the color, the diversity, the clever specializations? And it's challenging to capture. Thanks for sharing, and I also like how the colors came out.

Mike Spinak said:

I also took exposures with differences in focus, for trying focus stacking, later.

Click to expand...

That will be an interesting exercise. The challenge will be, besides the technical issues, to keep the background from becoming too distractingly sharp. A common pitfall is that selective unsharpness tends to get sacrificed in the effort. It doen't have to be, but it'll require some clever layering/masking, something that most of the current software applications neglect. Therefore the photographer can still make a difference.

Bart

Bart,

I think I'll probably try the focus stacking manually. I'm mainly interested in trying it with the second picture, just to get the red parts in front of the fly in focus.

Cheers.

Here's my first attempt at focus stacking:



It's not perfect, but hopefully it's decent. I ran into an unexpected complication: The plant was moving faster than I had realized, between frames.

Mike Spinak said:

It's not perfect, but hopefully it's decent. I ran into an unexpected complication: The plant was moving faster than I had realized, between frames.

Click to expand...

It's very decent, given the issues that movement and magnification differences pose. It's an improvement over what physics allows to capture in a single shot.

Bart

Thanks, Bart. I hope you enjoy it.

I've focus stacked a few shots over the last few days, and I am really liking focus stacking. For those macro photographers, here, who haven't tried it, yet, it's well worth trying.

I hope you'll walk us through an example!~

Asher

I'm no expert, and what I do is fairly straightforward. In the field, shoot a picture–adjust focus–shoot another–adjust focus–shoot another, etc.

When home, carefully line them up. Then make multiple layers, and take the sharpest parts from each, and put them into a single image. A quick and dirty way to do it is to use the close tool, and clone the sharp parts from one picture onto another.