Photo Equipment and Processing

All of the photographs were taken with digital cameras, primarily Nikon DSLRs, including D70, D200, D300S and (currently) D810. Most DSLR photos were taken with a Nikkor-Micro 70-180mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom macro lens. Other cameras were used as well, including aim-and-shoots Canon SD650, Nikon P7000 and Sony RSX-100IV.

Some of the photos are products of the focus stacking technique to put into focus the subject and blur the rest. I use either the lens focus barrel or a Kirk FR-2 focussing rail. The technique involves taking several or many images at different focal lengths and using software to stack them together to produce an image with all or selected parts in focus. There are three examples on this page. Photos 3633/3648, 1377/1390 and 1859/1878 are stacks of 16, 14 and 20 images, respectively.

Most photos were taken with natural light but some close-up shots were made using a Nikon RC1 macro flash system.

Almost all photos are shot with camera RAW file format and developed and converted to JPEGs on a Macintosh computer with Adobe Lightroom, Topaz Photo AI for noise reduction, if needed, and Color Efex4 Pro software for contrast enhancement, if needed. For the focus stacks I use Helicon Focus software to process the images.

My processing steps consist of first identifying the plants and organizing them in Lightroom with keywords. The photos are usually cropped and exposures/contrasts adjusted before converting to JPEGs and uploaded to my website using Blocs web development software.

Using the Images

The photographs on this site are copyrighted, but can be used with prior permission and attribution. Please contact me about usage or if you would like prints.

When contacting me, please give the image number you are inquiring about. It's the 4 digit number following the plant name. 

Image numbers are assigned by the camera while photographing. Usually there is just one number. In some cases there are two, such as 6764/6789, indicating that several or many images, in this case 26, were taken at different focal lengths and stacked together to produce an image with most or all parts in focus. This process is called focus stacking.