Datura

Wickedly beautiful and delicate.

that is a scary looking pod and good looking photograph ...

frickin' sweet!

Ah..., you should definitely have a look at my "Monsterball" series!:

http://www.boeringa.demon.nl/monsterball/index.html

Marco

Keith, I like this and the "pasta" image. Could you explain about the 5x7 back? Would this technique work on and RB?

Thanks! Yes, these are definitely not balls that one would want to squeeze :rolleyes: The little seeds are, I think, the part that ladies used to ingest ~100 yrs ago to cause their pupils to dilate so that their eyes looked more romantic.

stradibarrius said:

Could you explain about the 5x7 back? Would this technique work on and RB?

Click to expand...

Well, I just put the RZ lens on a lensboard for a 5x7 camera, and I shot to 5x7 film usign a normal 5x7 film holder. I glued together a body cap and a rear lens cap, drilled out the middle, and the resulting object fastens the lens to the lensboard. At macro focus, say 1:1 and up, the lens covers 5x7. This particular lens is definitely not a great performer at macro range in terms of rectilinearity and corner sharpness and res and so forth, there are much better ones in the rb/rz lineup if you wanted those things, but I picked this lens for its soft character. At 1:1 and up, there is plenty of image circle for substantial tilts, as you see here. This was ~2:1 macro so the image circle was ample.

The nicest thing about working with a 2.8 lens on 5x7 is that the ground glass is *bright* even at macro magnifications. So you can work out the critical tilts etc. wide open and then stop down as much as you wish. In this case I took shots at several different apertures and just settled on this one because there is a balance of softness and sharpness that I think emphasizes the spikes. When I stopped down more the subject became to two-dimensional IMHO.

P.S. The tilt/shift adapter for the rz (or the hassie) is way, way more limited than what you can do with a simple view camera rig.

keithwms said:

Thanks! Yes, these are definitely not balls that one would want to squeeze :rolleyes:

Click to expand...

Hehehe, well, that's your dirty mind at play. Actually, I meant another type of "ball" with the title of my series... In some of the pictures of the series, the pods look like monster puppets with arms stretched out dancing (well, at least one picture that inspired the name of the series...)

Those are very cool shots marco, well done. They do indeed look like big open mouths!