Tiny Tuesday: Feather

Pinkhairedlady is hosting Tiny Tuesday this month, and would like us to concentrate on "things that make you happy". This is great for me, as I find the intricacies of nature in high magnification fascinating and great fun to explore. To that end I'm currently experimenting with more extreme forms of macro photography - for example with my first blip taken with a Raynox add-on lens a couple of weeks ago.

This week I decided to focus on a feather, and a pretty tiny one at that - the inset with the millimetre scale shows that the whole of the feather is only about 2x2 cm. On the inset I've marked which part of it is shown in the main picture. This shows how each "mini-quill" section of the feather has its own tiny fine "hairs" on it.

I think it would have been better if I'd used more layers in the focus stack (this was 15 layers, in-camera) but I ran out of time, so some parts of the feather are out of focus. But I'm regarding it as part of my learning curve.

Please look large if you've time.

(Note: It's not actually a monochrome but it more or less turned out that way.)