Big Cats and Flowers

My last wander about the local Wandoo forest didn’t yield anything much. The only plants worth getting the camera out for were some Leopard Orchids. So I did my usual full length portrait using my 40-150mm f2.8 plus MC-14 teleconverter with focus stacking. Then a tighter “head and shoulders” shot with the 60mm f2.8 macro and flash. I finished up with really tight detail shot at close to 1:1 again with the 60mm macro.

 

Leopard Orchid by Paul Amyes on 500px.com
Leopard Orchid, Thelymitra benthamiana. A 10 shot focus stack using the Olympus EM1 mk ii, Olympus 40-150mm f28 lens and the the Olympus MC-14 teleconverter. File assembled in Photoshop.

 

Leopard Orchid by Paul Amyes on 500px.com
If you look closely at the main flower there is a spider peeping out and the fly on the edge of plant is caught in its web. Leopard Orchid, Thelymitra benthamiana.

 

In the past I’ve used OM Workspace to do the focus stacks, but after it’s latest update it has become so slow – glaciers move quicker. So I decided to to do the stack using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. To say it was much faster would be a massive understatement, but the final result was a lot better as well. For the life of me I can’t work out why camera manufacturers software is so bad. It should be better as they know all the features of the cameras and how to get the best out of them. This isn’t just a whinge directed at OM Systems. Canon’s DPP is absolutely appalling as well. Adobe would’t have such a stranglehold on the market if the camera manufacturers could develop good software.