You May Become Sick of This

You May Become Sick of This macro business, but what can you do except post about what you are doing?

Since last year, once I purchased my macro lens, I have intended to do some macro photography, especially during winter. Particularly for the past few weeks, the weather has really dissuaded me from heading out (not that I require much dissuading), and so macro is pretty much all that I can do with my camera.

In addition to the macro lens and the ring flash, I recently acquired a Third Hand device, which is a sort of clamp. I hadn't used it yet, but on this day, I cut off a bit of the polka dot plant in an attempt to highlight a little section and focus on it without other leaves getting in the way.

This is the setup. It's hard to tell at this scale, but the rest of the plant is several inched behind the cutoff section, which is approximately within the red box, or at least the part that I photographed is within that area.

The clamp holds the section of interest several inches in front of the rest of the plant

I wanted to highlight the hairs/spines on the plant which I had noticed a bit on the previous shoot. But this section also contained a blossom which doubled the interest for me.

After the usual adjusting, stacking (8 layers this time), and cropping, this is the result in 3:2 format.

I also applied a 1:1 square crop, but I like the above 3:2 version better with the negative space to the right.