Toad-Lily Macro

Given the continuing dull weather and the fact that I left my blip capture until quite late in the day, an indoor blip became imperative and I thought I may as well build on the ideas I had from yesterday's blip. So I went to see my neighbour with the good news of the the identification of her plant and then asked her if I could take a bit of her plant to do some macro photography, to which she readily agreed.

The pond-lily is an incredibly complicated plant and I just wanted to concentrate on the topmost styles which are covered by stalked, spherical, glistening glands. In the sunshine these glow like golden orbs. Because of the complexity of the plant it was quite a challenge to get these sufficiently in focus whilst throwing the rest of the flower out of focus. I was using my narrowest aperture on my 50mm macro lens f32 and having to do a photo-stack of five images and then in order throw the rest of the bloom out of focus I had to select this and use some gaussian blur in photoshop.

For sucha pretty plant the name is not particularly attractive. "A Philippine species Tricyrtis imeldae (named after Imelda, wife of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos), grows in a region that is the home of the Tasaday tribe. Tasaday hunters would crush the plant?s parts, and leave the scented juice on their hands in order to attract frogs and toads for food. It is now believed that the entire description was an elaborate hoax, and that the idea that one could attract toads by the scent of the plant was nonsense. This reappraisal of the situation has done nothing however to deter the use of the amusing common name ? so Toad-Lily it is! "

Worth seeing LARGE to see the detail of these globules

If you want to learn some more about this plant and see some macro photography which puts mine to shame go to this link Microscopy