Can You Guess What This Is?

by Sean Setters

I took a shot yesterday that I thought looked interesting, so I thought we'd have a little fun with it today.

Can you guess what the subject of the photo is? You can click on the image above to download a higher resolution version for analysis. Then scroll down for the answer.

Answer: It's the seed head of a grass plant.

Backstory

I really wanted to create a macro focus stack image, but I was having a difficulty coming up with an idea for an interesting subject. As I often do when I'm experiencing a mental block for a macro subject, I strolled around my lawn to see what I could find. It had been raining off and on in Savannah, GA for several days, so I hadn't been able to mow the lawn in quite some time. Some of the grass had gotten very tall, and one such plant drew my attention. I marveled at the plant's seed head as I inspected it closely, and decided my search for a macro subject was complete. Now onto the photography bit.

I attached stacked Kenko extension tubes and a Kenko 1.4x Teleconverter to my Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM and mounted it all onto my EOS 5D Mark III (tripod mounted, of course). Two studio strobes were already set up in my studio with one firing through a 4 x 6' (1.2 x 1.8 m) and a 3' x 8" (0.9 x 0.2 m) gridded stripbox, so I simply used those for lighting. A bottle provided a nice stand for the stem the grass plant.

I originally shot it without a background which caused the background to be completely black. However, while the light colored part of the seed head stood out very well, the black portions (unsure what their name is), understandably, did not. So, I searched my home for something that might provide a suitable background color for the subject (I didn't expect to see recognizable details in the macro shot because of the limited depth-of-field and camera-to-subject and subject-to-background distance). I found my answer donning the wall of our kitchen – a calendar someone had given us for Christmas.

I attached the calendar to a backlight stand via a reflector holder and positioned the calendar so that the pictured flowers were directly behind the seed head. So here's what the setup looked like:

And here's a closeup with the flashes illuminating the subject:

I captured 36 images with the Focus Stack feature of Magic Lantern (installed on the 5D III) which were compiled in Helicon Focus. EXIF settings for the individual images were f/6.3, 1/160 sec, ISO 100.

After compiling the images in Helicon Focus and a little bit of editing in Photoshop CC, I arrived at the image below.

At this point, I was pretty happy with the image. But as I as I began to look at it in detail, the black parts of the seed head reminded me of trees. With that in mind, I rotated the image so that the stalk portion of the seed head was horizontal and cropped it so that the other half of the stalk (and the mirrored portion of the seed head) would remain unseen. Unfortunately, I didn't give myself enough leeway in the original framing to allow for the background to cover the entire frame at such an extreme angle of rotation. Therefore, I had to recreate the background (using content aware fill) in the areas where no background existed. But after that, the image you see atop this post was finished.

For what it's worth, I'm consistently amazed by the details found in readily available (very common) subjects that await capture with a macro lens and (sometimes) the higher magnification made possible by extension tubes and teleconverters.