Whenever I’ve stopped in Williams it always been on the way to somewhere else and I’ve always been quick to get a move on. Well the other day I gave Williams my full attention. There are a few good spots for orchids there and I wanted to visit one in particular as it is the home to the Common Dragon Orchid. Despite its name I’ve never found the Common Dragon Orchid to be very common – in fact I’d only seen a rather manky looking one some twenty years ago. That, as they say, is a long time between drinks.

The bit of scrubby land that is home to the flowers is pretty ordinary to look at. It’s situated on the corner of a busy highway and a dirt track. Judging from the car bodies, rusted metal, bottles and corrugated asbestos it’s been used for fly tipping for years. But situated under the sheaoak trees in amongst the needles were an amazing variety of orchids. Common Dragon Orchids, well they were certainly common there. There were hundreds of them.

The first three images are pretty straight photos using the Olympus 60mm f2.8 macro lens and STF-8 flash or the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 with no flash.

 

 

The last couple were done as focus stacks using the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 and MC-14 1.4x teleconverter. The stacks were assembled in Photoshop.