Bee Orchid

I’ve seen Bee Orchids before. I went all the way to Brixham to search for them and was successful.

They were a joyful treat. After all, look at their cute faces and jellybean bodies. I managed a few handheld photographs which were moderately successful. What I really wanted, though, was a crisp photograph which was in focus from front to back. That means using ‘stacking’, a technique to take several photographs and combine just the in-focus bits of them into one image. That’s obviously technically difficult, because the flower moves between photographs and the light changes and they’re tiny and… well, no end of difficulties.

I had a go, gently clamped the flower stalk in soft foam jaws and took 100 photographs of a single flower, one after another, gradually changing the focus, and then combined the middle section of the shots where the focus was where I wanted.

This is the result.

Bee Orchid - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

It’s an improvement, but now I know how to do it I could do it so much better. I can feel another trip out on my bicycle to see them in my near future.

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