Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

A flower from a peace lily.

In the fall of 1975 I had just moved to Ann Arbor when a girl walked into my dorm room with a plant in her hands. "I don't like it here and I'm leaving and need someone to take care of this plant. It needs light and water," she said. And with that she handed me a peace lily.

The plant is big and beautiful today. It (or its progeny) have been in my homes and offices over the years. it flowers on a schedule that only it knows, and today it burst out in with several of these blooms. So here is a photo of one of them.

Pentax K1, A*200mm f4 macro, 54 exposures in 3 stacks, pixel shift resolution. I can't begin to enumerate the false starts, missteps and general screw ups that occurred as I worked with this today. But there are several more flowers opening so I can work and learn with them in the next few days.

A red flower snatched out of a boquet...

A botanical study of a tulip blossom... They aren't blooming here in Michigan yet (at least not in my yard) so I swiped this from a bouquet. It's starting to wilt a little...

This is a stack focused composit of 72 images.

Yesterday I took a break from studio macros and spent some time outdoors with the Holga. A small path into a windbreak between two snow covered corn fields revealed this spot:

Another botanical study:

My lilac bush is tarting to bud out - leaves only at this point - and here is a macro shot of some of the leaf buds:

About 1.5x lifesized, made with Pentax DFA 100mm f2.8 macro on extension tubes. (I'm lucky to have a set of K mount extension tubes that have full contacts so that all auto modes are present with A, F, FA and DFA lenses.)

This is made form 55 files stacked in Zerene tsacker - 2 separate stacks that were combined in Photoshop. This image wa smade from out of camera JPG's. I also shot raw files and converted them using th eSIlkyPix raw file converter supplied with the camera, but the stacked images displayed some subtle aberrations (well - "smudges" better describes it) in the white space around the image. Hopefully with practice I'll get adept at using Silkypix in order to unleash the full detail contained in the iamge. As it - this image at full resolution show far more detail than I can see in the subject, even with effective 10x magnification.

Closeup of Virginia Creeper tendrils:

Another botanical study - a goldenrod gall: