Parrot Tulips and More

Parrot tulips are more "flamboyant" than most common tulips. Their petals have a unique fringe design with scalloped edges. They're a delight both outdoors and indoors.

The photos in this post are mostly black parrot tulips, which are a deep purple color. When strongly lit, the petals look more red.

This is such a photogenic tulip that I've included several different views here. I've also included a few other flower photos and one frog to break up the set as you scroll through.

This first photo was taken on an indoor windowsill.

Fringe Curve

Rising Above

 Here's a blossom on our crab apple tree:

Neck Pillows

 Grape hyacinths provide a nice break from too many red hues:

Grape Trees

These next two photos are also from our indoor arrangement:

Inside Zone

All Frills

This frog was watching me closely while I took outdoor pictures:

Frog in Mulch

Parrot Petals

Life in the Center

All photos © 2020, all rights reserved.  Contact philslens@gmail.com for licensing or to order prints.

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Drenched in Light

Deb's indoor plant arrangements just inside our kitchen window were glowing in the morning sunlight. In these photos I had some fun capturing the strong morning light as it passed through the glasses and water. While the flowers themselves are lovely, these photos highlight other aspects of the arrangement.

These are all taken with my macro lens.

Water Plant

Bubbles

Floating

Petals Up

Refraction

All photos © 2020, all rights reserved.  Contact philslens@gmail.com for licensing or to order prints.

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Indoor Flowers and Focus Bracketing

While the beautiful colors of outdoor flowers are hard to find mid-winter in New England, there are still indoor flowers to delight. Here are a few quick samples.

You are probably familiar with HDR, high dynamic range photos, where photos of different exposure get merged. Most cameras and many cell phones have this capability. In contrast to that, my camera also has a new focus bracketing capability, as explained below.

The orchid below is shown three ways: in a single "best" photo, as a focus bracketed stacked photo, and as one of the photos in the stack. My Olympus camera's new focus bracketing/stacking feature in the latest firmware allows me to take several identical photos (in this case, ten, though one could stack a few hundred if one wanted to!) at slightly different focus distances from one another and merge them together into a single photo with a much higher depth of field (area in focus) than any of the original photos individually. While the camera takes the bracketed set of photos, I actually merge them later in Photoshop. Focus bracketing is a pretty neat feature and I've had some fun experimenting with it. I still enjoy the soft "bokeh" of the out of focus areas in the single photos, so I'm hard pressed to decide which version I prefer. Which do you prefer?

Here's the orchid at its best in a single normal photo using my 60mm macro lens:

Orchid

Next is a focus stacked version of the same orchid. Notice how more of the orchid is in focus. Note that the above non-stacked photo is actually not one of the ten used to create this focus stacked picture, but was actually taken a few moments later, as I preferred its lighting and composition to any of the ten.

Focus Stacked Orchid

For reference, here's one of the ten photos used in the above focus stacked composition. You'll note that it is uncropped, and I hadn't yet magically removed the dark lines of the orchid's support.

Orchid - Uncropped

We have other indoor plants as well. Here's an African Violet (not focus stacked). See how its textured surface sparkles.

African Violet

All photos © 2016, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

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