Maple Tree Flowers

[Doug L]

My focus this year is to learn more about plants - especially wildflowers and trees. Here is a picture of a Silver or Red Maple (will confirm ID after leaves come out) tree starting to flower after the March heatwave. The interesting thing about maples is that each tree can have male (yellowish) or female (red) flowers, or sometimes a combination of both. In order to get the whole end of the twig and flowers in focus, I took a 'stack' of images (40 in total) with my 90mm macro lens and combined them with Helicon Focus software.

[Iguanasan]

Nice work on the focus stacking...I really like the resulting shot. What aperture were you using on the lens for each of the individual slices?

[Hillbillygirl]

Very nice work Doug. Always love seeing horticulture shots.

[Mad Aussie]

Huh ... never seen maple flowers before. Cool

[asnow]

Wow. I'm impressed with the focus stacking. Hard to believe this is combination of 40 images.

[Doug L]

Thanks everyone for the comments. Re: aperture, I can't be totally sure but I think the lens was set to F8. Basically, I wanted the greatest depth of field as I could get with the light available to insure I had good overlap of sharp areas for each shot. It took a few hours to get a good series. The biggest problem was that the branch would start moving due to wind or chickadees landing looking for a handout. The other difficulty was that the light would change in the middle of the series due to clouds covering the sun. Here is a single image in the series - very little in focus.