serpentine jewel flowers

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SSSdave
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serpentine jewel flowers

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Productive day. And productive last 2 weeks. Drove down to Santa Teresa County Park. Was there Saturday too. Hiked maybe 3 miles today through oak savana serpentine knee to waist high grasslands, often off the trails. Have been out shooting wildflowers 6 times this last couple weeks and today was probably the last good chance of light breezes I need for captures before it all gets too dry as it is almost May now. But this last week has been good.

So after climbing under one park barbed wire fence and up and over 2, ventured along a steep serpentine outcrop while looking for jewel flowers, streptanthus glandulosus that in this species is beautifully red-purple saturated, I might frame up against colorful lichened rock. This subject presented difficulties. The plant was off several inches from the rock so would need to fix depth of field blurring issues. I placed the plant partially against the edge of a still shadowed face of the rock so it would stand out well. Note I use a Benbo Tripod for close-up work. Used both my 32 inch circular reflectors to calm the north breeze while patiently waiting for moments of calm I would take about 20 individual shots of. F14 F11 F8 F5.6 at varying focus distances using viewfinder manual spot auto focus. Most of the work was in Zerene Stacker in which I manually judge which frame appears sharpest that is then painted into the master composite. Only subject I worked all day.

Every section of the image is worked on several times as judging sharpness looking at a computer screen has limits. Later in CS6, I had to clone in some edges here and there of the plant that had been blurred. 6000x4000 pixels, with above downsized to 1.6k and 1.26k respectively at 100% pixels.

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