The pistils of a Dandelion join hands and swirl and dance to the sound of Nature's life melody that only they can hear...

For Angela Schaerer who loves dandelions as much as I...

An experiment in extremely shallow DoF for creating abstracts.

Please note that what you are looking at is as it came straight out of the camera. The only processing was to crop and a slight noise reduction. Shot in RAW format with the noise filter and noise reduction turned off in the camera.

Here is how you can try this yourself.

The lens used was a Zuiko F/2.0 50mm 1:2 Macro 4/3rds,, 100mm 1:1 Macro 35mm equiv. This is a primary lens ie no zoom capability.

At F/2.0 in macro mode the DoF is only a few millimeters deep. You can exploit the shallow DoF for very interesting effects. You can do this with any lens as long as you understand it's DoF characteristics.

In this shot I positioned myself at the angle of interest about 10 inches or so from the flower. Using Aperture mode I selected F/2.0.

Looking through the viewfinder I increased or decreased my distance previewing DoF to get what I wanted and used Spot AF. You will not see the image like it is shown here but don't worry it is there. :-)

I took several shots to get good coverage and used Auto Exposure Bracketing so that when I fired a shot, I also got shots bracketed +/- .7.

Bring your image into your favorite editor. For this I used Corel Paintshop Pro. I save PS for the intricate work.

Apply your crop. Zoom to 100% and you will see the abstract nature from the DoF. I used a 100% crop ie no enlarging or reducing is done. Don't sharpen so that you get a nice soft effect.

F/2.0, exposure bias -.7, 1/4000th!!!, ISO 100, IS